TRAUGOTT - TROUSDALE - Constructionalization and Constructional Changes

Constructionalization and Constructional Changes
O X F O R D S T U D I E S I N D I A C H R O N I C A ND H I S T O R I C A L L I N G U I S T I CS
general editors
Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts, University of Cambridge
advisory editors
Cynthia Allen, Australian National University; Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, University of Man-
chester; Theresa Biberauer, University of Cambridge; Charlotte Galves, University of Campinas;
Geoff Horrocks, University of Cambridge; Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University; Anthony Kroch,
University of Pennsylvania; David Lightfoot, Georgetown University; Giuseppe Longobardi,
University of York; David Willis, University of Cambridge
published
1
From Latin to Romance
Morphosyntactic Typology and Change
Adam Ledgeway
2
Parameter Theory and Linguistic Change
Edited by Charlotte Galves, Sonia Cyrino, Ruth Lopes, Filomena Sandalo, and
Juanito Avelar
3
Case in Semitic
Roles, Relations, and Reconstruction
Rebecca Hasselbach
4
The Boundaries of Pure Morphology
Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives
Edited by Silvio Cruschina, Martin Maiden, and John Charles Smith
5
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean
Volume I: Case Studies
Edited by David Willis, Chris Lucas, and Anne Breitbarth
6
Constructionalization and Constructional Changes
Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale
[For a complete list of books published and in preparation for the series see p. 279]
Constructionalization
and Constructional
Changes
EL IZAB ETH CLO SS TRAUG O TT A N D

GRAEME TROUSDALE
1
3
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Contents
Series preface ix
Acknowledgements x
Figures and tables xii
Abbreviations xiii
Inventory of notation xv
Data bases and electronic corpora xvi
1 The Framework 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Constructional approaches to language 2
1.2.1 Berkeley Construction Grammar 3
1.2.2 Sign-Based Construction Grammar 4
1.2.3 Cognitive Construction Grammar 4
1.2.4 Radical Construction Grammar 6
1.2.5 Cognitive Grammar 7
1.2.6 Our representation of constructions 8
1.3 Networks and construction grammar 8
1.4 Constructions and factors relevant to them 11
1.4.1 Constructions characterized 11
1.4.2 Schematicity, productivity, and compositionality 13
1.4.2.1 Schematicity 13
1.4.2.2 Productivity 17
1.4.2.3 Compositionality 19
1.5 A constructional view of change 20
1.5.1 A characterization and example of constructionalization 22
1.5.2 Constructional changes 26
1.5.3 The relation of constructional changes to constructionalization 27
1.5.4 Instantaneous constructionalization 29
1.6 Diachronic work particularly relevant to this book 30
1.6.1 ‘Construction’ as used in earlier historical linguistics 31
1.6.2 Grammaticalization 32
1.6.3 Lexicalization 33
1.6.4 Mechanisms of change 35
1.6.4.1 Neoanalysis (‘reanalysis’) 35
1.6.4.2 Analogization (‘analogy’) 37
1.6.5 Work on diachronic construction grammar 39
vi Contents
1.7 Evidence 40
1.8 Summary and outline of the book 43
2 A Usage-Based Approach to Sign Change 45
2.1 Introduction 45
2.2 Usage-based models 46
2.2.1 Storage as a unit 48
2.2.2 Sanction 49
2.3 Networks in a usage-based model 50
2.3.1 The relationship between networks, language processing,
and language learning 51
2.3.2 Spreading activation 54
2.3.3 Implications for ‘analogy’ 56
2.4 Types of links 59
2.4.1 Relational links 59
2.4.2 Inheritance links 61
2.5 Growth, obsolescence, and reconfiguration in a network 62
2.5.1 The life-cycle of constructions 62
2.5.1.1 Growth at the margins 63
2.5.1.2 Staying at the margins 64
2.5.1.3 Marginalization and loss of a construction 65
2.5.2 Reconfiguration of links 71
2.6 Categories, gradience, and gradualness 73
2.7 A case study: the development of the way-construction revisited 76
2.7.1 The way-construction in PDE 76
2.7.2 Precursors of the way-construction 79
2.7.3 Constructionalization of the way-construction 83
2.7.4 Further expansion of the way-construction 86
2.7.5 Growth of the way-construction in a network 89
2.7.6 The status of the way-construction on the lexical-grammatical
gradient 90
2.8 Summary and some questions 91
3 Grammatical Constructionalization 94
3.1 Introduction 94
3.2 Approaches to grammaticalization 96
3.2.1 Grammaticalization as reduction and increased dependency 100
3.2.2 Grammaticalization as expansion 105
3.2.3 The interconnectedness of the GR and GE approaches 108
3.3 A constructional approach to directionality 112
3.3.1 Increase in productivity 113
Contents vii
3.3.2 Increase in schematicity 116

3.3.3 Decrease in compositionality 120
3.3.4 The interweaving of GR and GE factors in constructionalization
and constructional change 123
3.3.5 Possible motivations for directionality of change 124
3.4 Rethinking degrammaticalization in terms of constructionalization 127
3.4.1 Deinflectionalization 128
3.4.2 Debonding 131
3.4.3 A caution against projecting original uses from the present 132
3.5 A case study: the development of ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts 136
3.5.1 Precursors of ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts 139
3.5.2 Early pseudo-clefts 141
3.5.3 The later history of ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts 142
3.5.4 Discussion 145
3.6 Summary 147
4 Lexical Constructionalization 149
4.1 Introduction 149
4.2 On some characteristics of lexical constructions 150
4.3 Some approaches to lexicalization 156
4.3.1 Alleged discrete outputs of lexicalization and
grammaticalization 156
4.3.2 Lexicalization as entry into the inventory 160
4.3.3 Toward rethinking views of lexicalization in the light of
lexical constructionalization 161
4.4 Changing productivity, schematicity, and compositionality in
lexical constructionalization 163
4.4.1 Productivity 164
4.4.2 Schematicity 165
4.4.3 Compositionality 166
4.5 The development of lexical (sub)schemas 168
4.5.1 OE dom 170
4.5.2 OE ræden 173
4.5.3 Choices among nominal affixoids in OE and ME 175
4.6 The development of atomic lexical constructions 177
4.7 Lexical constructionalization of clauses and phrases 182
4.8 On the instantaneous development of some lexical
constructions 186
4.9 Lexical constructionalization and degrammaticalization 190
4.10 Summary 192
viii Contents
5 Contexts for Constructionalization 195

5.2 A framework for thinking about contexts 198
5.2.1 Key contextual factors in pre-constructionalization 198
5.2.2 Post-constructionalization contextual changes 203
5.3 Types of contexts for constructionalization 207
5.3.1 Contexts for the development of word-formation schemas:
-dom, -ræden, and -lac 207
5.3.2 Partitive contexts for the development of binominal quantifiers:
a lot of 209
5.3.3 Contexts for the development of an adjective of difference
into a quantifier: several 214
5.3.4 Contexts for the development of future BE going to 217
5.3.5 Slots as contexts for the development of snowclones: not
the ADJest N1 in the N2 224
5.3.6 Contexts for the rise of pseudo-clefts 225
5.4 Persistence of enabling contexts 227
5.5 Summary 230
6 Review and Future Prospects 231
6.2 The major objectives 231
6.2.1 A summative example: ish 233
6.3 Some areas for further research 237
References 240
Index of key historical examples 267
Index of names 268
Index of subjects 274
Series preface
Modern diachronic linguistics has important contacts with other subdisciplines,
notably first-language acquisition, learnability theory, computational linguistics,
sociolinguistics, and the traditional philological study of texts. It is now recognized
in the wider field that diachronic linguistics can make a novel contribution to
linguistic theory, to historical linguistics, and arguably to cognitive science more
widely.
This series provides a forum for work in both diachronic and historical linguistics,
including work on change in grammar, sound, and meaning within and across
languages; synchronic studies of languages in the past; and descriptive histories of
one or more languages. It is intended to reflect and encourage the links between these
subjects and fields such as those mentioned above.
The goal of the series is to publish high-quality monographs and collections of
papers in diachronic linguistics generally, i.e. studies focusing on change in linguis-
tic structure, and/or change in grammars, which are also intended to make a
contribution to linguistic theory, by developing and adopting a current theoretical
model, by raising wider questions concerning the nature of language change, or by
developing theoretical connections with other areas of linguistics and cognitive
science as listed above. There is no bias towards a particular language or language
family or towards a particular theoretical framework; work in all theoretical frame-
works, and work based on the descriptive tradition of language typology, as well as
quantitatively based work using theoretical ideas, also feature in the series.
Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts
University of Cambridge
September 2011
Acknowledgements
Coming to grips with the challenge of rethinking many aspects of language change,
most especially grammaticalization and lexicalization in a constructional framework,
has required time and many exploratory discussions. We have enjoyed debating and
arguing points with a large number of students and colleagues, and especially
between ourselves.
The number of people who have inspired us is huge and we are not able to thank
everyone personally. Elizabeth Traugott particularly thanks Alexander Bergs and
Gabriele Diewald for inviting her to participate in the workshop on ‘Constructions
and Language Change’ held in conjunction with the 17th International Conference on
Historical Linguistics in Madison, WI, 2005, an event that was the impetus for the
work discussed here. Other conferences where significant opportunities to develop
and discuss ideas occurred include the 6th International Conference on Construction
Grammar in Prague, 2010, organized by Mirjam Fried, the Workshop on Diachronic
Construction Grammar, 44th Societas Linguistica Europea, Logroño in 2011, organ-
ized by Jóhanna Barðdal and Spike Gildea, and the International Conference on
Grammaticalization Theory and Data in Rouen, organized by Sophie Hancil, 2012.
Thanks are due to colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing,
Southwest University, Chongqing, and the Universities of Erlangen, Freiburg, San-
tiago de Compostela, and Stockholm, where some of the ideas in the book were
discussed. Above all, thanks to the students and colleagues in Traugott’s seminar in
2011 at Stanford University on constructionalization, most especially Richard Futrell,
Mei-chun Liu, Joanna Nykiel, Yoshiko Matsumoto, and Fangqiong Zhan. Graeme
Trousdale thanks audiences at a number of conferences and workshops, including
but not limited to those at New Reflections on Grammaticalization 4 in Leuven in
2008, convened by Bert Cornillie, Hubert Cuyckens, Kristin Davidse, Torsten
Leuschner, and Tanja Mortelmans; Current Trends in Grammaticalization Research
in Groningen in 2009, organized by Muriel Norde and Alexandra Lenz; and the
workshop on theory and data in cognitive linguistics at the 43rd Societas Linguistica
Europea, in Vilnius in 2010, organized by Nikolas Gisborne and Willem Hollmann.
He is also grateful for discussions with colleagues and students in Edinburgh,
particularly in the English Language Research Group, and in his English Grammar
class.
Both authors would like to thank the following friends and colleagues, who have
commented on drafts of the material presented here: Tine Breban, Timothy Colle-
man, Hendrik De Smet, Nikolas Gisborne, Martin Hilpert, Willem Hollmann,
Richard Hudson, Muriel Norde, Amanda Patten, Peter Petré and Freek Van de
Acknowledgements xi
Velde. We are also grateful to anonymous reviewers, both those commissioned by

Oxford University Press for their helpful feedback on a draft version of parts of the
manuscript, and those involved in reviewing the journal papers and book chapters we
wrote leading up to this book. Finally, we would like to thank John Davey and
colleagues at Oxford University Press for their help and advice while guiding the
book through the various stages of publication.
Figures and tables
Figures
1.1 Model of the symbolic structure of a construction in Radical
Construction Grammar (Croft 2001: 18) 6
1.2 A small conceptual network 10
1.3 Gradient of hierarchic relationships among constructions 17
2.1 Langacker’s (2008: 226) representation of a constructional network 51
2.2 Way-patterns at the beginning of the 17th century 83
2.3 Way-patterns at the end of the 17th century 85
2.4 Way-patterns at the end of the 19th century 89
3.1 Quantifier use of some size nouns in COBUILD
(based on Brems 2012: 211) 116
3.2 The productivity cline (based on Barðdal 2008: 38, 172) 119
4.1 A schema for some lexical constructions in -able 153
Tables
1.1 Dimensions of constructions 13
1.2 Motivation vs. mechanism 38
2.1 Subtypes of the English impersonal construction 69
3.1 Conceptual axes for work on language change 99
3.2 Correlation of grammaticality parameters
(based on Lehmann 1995: 164) 101
3.3 Compatibility of the development of a new grammatical
micro-construction with Lehmann’s processes of grammaticalization 123
4.1 Lexicalization, grammaticalization, or both? 159
4.2 Relative frequency of four affixoids 177
4.3 Gradual and instantaneous constructionalization 190
4.4 Schematicity, productivity, and compositionality in lexical
and grammatical constructionalization 193
Abbreviations
ACC accusative
A(DJ) adjective
Agt agent
ART article
CC constructional change
Cxzn constructionalization
D-QUANT quantifying determiner
DAT dative
DET determiner
DIR directional
DIS discourse
EModE Early Modern English
F form
FUT future
GE grammaticalization as expansion
GEN genitive
GR grammaticalization as reduction
HPSG Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
INF infinitive
LE lexicalization as expansion
LR lexicalization as reduction
M meaning
ME Middle English
MODADJ Modifying adjective
ModE Modern English
MORPH morphology
N noun
NEG negative
NOM nominative
NP noun phrase
O(BJ) object
OBL oblique
OE Old English
P preposition
PDE Present Day English
POSS possessive
PP prepositional phrase
PRAG pragmatics
PRES present
xiv Abbreviations
Quant quantity
Rec recipient
SAI subject-auxiliary inversion
SBCG Sign-Based Construction Grammar
SEM semantics
SG singular
SUBJ subject
SUPER superlative
SYN syntax
UG universal grammar
V verb
VITR intransitive verb
VP verb phrase
VTR transitive verb
X, Y, Z variables
Inventory of notation
[[F] $ [M]] construction (whether micro- or schema level)
$ symbolic link between form and meaning
> ‘is neoanalyzed as/becomes’
## ‘feeds’
______ strong link between nodes
----- weak link between nodes
... underspecified
small caps a lexical construction unspecified for morphological status (e.g. dom)
| compound (e.g. pick|pocket)
- affixoid (e.g. -hede in Middle English)
. affix (e.g. .ness)
Data bases and electronic corpora
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 2011. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 5 th ed.
BNC British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007. Distributed by Oxford
University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. http://www.natcorp.
ox.ac.uk/.
Bosworth-Toller An Anglo-Saxon dictionary, based on the manuscript collections of the late
Joseph Bosworth (first edition 1898) and Supplement (first edition 1921), ed. by Joseph
Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller. Digital edition by Sean Crist in 2001. http://www.
bosworthtoller.com/node/62873.
CEEC Corpus of Early English Correspondence. 1998. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena
Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, and Minna Palander-
Collin. Department of English, University of Helsinki. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/
CoRD/corpora/CEEC/index.html.
CL Abbreviation for CLMETEV used in citations.
CLMETEV The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (Extended Version). 2006. Compiled
by Hendrik De Smet. Department of Linguistics, University of Leuven. http://www.
helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CLMETEV/.
COCA The Corpus of Contemporary American English. 2008–. Compiled by Mark Davies.
Brigham Young University. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
COHA Corpus of Historical American English. 2010–. Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham
Young University. http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.
CWO Collins Wordbanks Online. http://www.collinslanguage.com/content-solutions/wordbanks.
DOEC Dictionary of Old English Corpus. 2011. Original release 1981 compiled by Angus
Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Sharon Butler, and Antonette diPaolo Healey.
Release 2009 compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey, Joan Holland, Ian McDougall, and
David McDougall, with Xin Xiang. University of Toronto. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/
CoRD/corpora/DOEC/index.html.
FROWN The Freiburg-Brown Corpus. Original release 1999 compiled by Christian Mair.
Release 2007 compiled by Christian Mair and Geoffrey Leech. http://www.helsinki.fi/
varieng/CoRD/corpora/FROWN/.
Google http://www.google.com/.
Google Books http://books.google.com/.
HC Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. 1991. Compiled by Matti Rissanen (Project leader), Merja
Kytö (Project secretary); Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö (Old English); Saara
Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen (Middle English); Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-
Brunberg (Early Modern English). Department of English, University of Helsinki. http://
www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus/index/html
ICAME International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English. http://icame.
uib.no/.
Data bases and electronic corpora xvii
Innsbruck Prose Sampler Corpus Sampler now included in Innsbruck Corpus of Middle
English Prose. http://www.uibk.ac.at/anglistik/projects/icamet/.
LION EEBO Early English Books Online, http://lion.chadwyck.com.
LION Literature Online, 1996–. http://lion.chadwyck.com.
MED The Middle English Dictionary. 1956–2001. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
http://www.hti.umich.edu/dict/med/.
OBP The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913. 2012. Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker,
Clive Emsley, Sharon Howard, and Jamie McLaughlin, et al. www.oldbaileyonline.org,
version 7.0.
OED Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.oed.com/.
PPCMBE Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English. 2010. Compiled by Anthony Kroch,
Beatrice Santorini, and Ariel Diertani. University of Pennsylvania. http://www.ling.
upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCMBE-RELEASE-1/index.html.
SBCSAE Santa Barbara Corpus of American Spoken American English, Parts 1–4. 2000–2005.
Du Bois, John, et al. Philadelphia PA: Linguistic Data Consortium. http://www.linguistics.
ucsb.edu/research/sbcorpus_contents.html.
TIME Time Magazine Corpus. 2007–. Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham Young University.
http://corpus.byu.edu/time.
Urban Dictionary http://www.urbandictionary.com/.

1
The Framework
1.1 Introduction
In this book we take a constructionalist approach to language change. As has been
suggested from a synchronic perspective by several current researchers in cognitive
linguistics, among them Goldberg (2006) and Langacker (2008), in a construction-
alist model language is conceptualized as being made up of form-meaning pairings or
‘constructions’ organized in a network. The question we address is how we can
account for change in the linguistic system, given this model of language. Our focus is
on developing ways to think about the creation of and the nature of changes in
constructions, understood as ‘conventional symbolic units’ (see e.g. Langacker 1987;
Croft 2005). Constructions are conventional in that they are shared among a group of
speakers. They are symbolic in that they are signs, typically arbitrary associations of
form and meaning. And they are units in that some aspect of the sign is so idiosyn-
cratic (Goldberg 1995) or so frequent (Goldberg 2006) that the sign is entrenched as a
form-meaning pairing in the mind of the language user.
We are concerned in this book with two main types of changes:
(a) Changes that affect features of an existing construction, e.g. semantics
(will- ‘intend’ > future), morphophonology (will > ’ll), collocational constraints
(expansion of the way-construction to include verbs denoting actions accom-
panying creation of a path, e.g. whistle one’s way home), etc. These changes do not
necessarily lead to a new construction. We call them ‘constructional changes’.
(b) The creation of a formnew-meaningnew pairing. We call this type of change
‘constructionalization’.1
The characterizations in (a) and (b) are preliminary. Constructionalization and the
constructional changes that lead up to and follow it are the topic of this book and will
be defined more fully in section 1.5 below.
We aim to show how a constructional perspective can be used to rethink and
incorporate aspects of prior work on grammaticalization and lexicalization, and to
1
The term ‘constructionalization’ appears to have been used first in Rostila (2004) and Noël (2007).
2 Constructionalization and Constructional Changes
constructively address some questions that have arisen in connection with those
topics. Although the data we discuss is from the history of English, our hope is to
develop a framework that will be fruitful in the study of constructions and change in
languages generally. Three assumptions are foundational to our approach. The first is
that while certain properties of grammar, such as networks, hierarchic organization
and inheritance, may be universal, and shared with other cognitive systems, grammar
itself, understood as knowledge of a linguistic system, is language-specific, that is, it is
tied to the structure of an individual language such as English, Arabic, or Japanese. The
second assumption is that change is change in usage, and that the locus of change is the
construct, an instance of use. Thirdly, we distinguish between change and innovation.
Innovation, as a feature of an individual mind, is only potential for change. For an
innovation to count as a change, it must have been replicated across populations of
speakers resulting in conventionalization, the integration of the innovation in a
tradition of speaking or writing, as evidenced by textual materials left to us (Weinreich,
Labov, and Herzog 1968; Andersen 2001). Innovation and propagation are in other
words ‘jointly necessary processes for language change’ (Croft 2000: 5).
The present chapter introduces a large number of concepts and terms as back-
ground to later chapters, where they will be discussed in far greater detail. We begin
by outlining the main constructional approaches to language that have been
developed to date (1.2) and introducing the concept of networks (1.3). We then go
on to outline essential elements of our own view of constructions (1.4) and of various
types of changes that affect them (1.5). Section 1.6 provides a sketch of research on
language change especially relevant to this book, specifically grammaticalization,
lexicalization, and prior work done from a diachronic construction grammar per-
spective. Section 1.7 introduces some of the problems associated with the search for
evidence in historical work and lists the main digital resources on which the present
work is based. 1.8 summarizes the chapter and outlines the rest of the book.
1.2 Constructional approaches to language

Here we very briefly outline five different models of grammar that have been used by
proponents of a constructional perspective on language and that will be referred to in
the course of the book. Construction grammars adhere to general principles of
cognitive linguistics (see Geeraerts and Cuyckens 2007a), and are constraint-based,
not rule-based. Overviews of the different approaches to construction grammar can
be found in Croft and Cruse (2004), Langacker (2005), Goldberg (2006), Croft
(2007a), and Sag, Boas, and Kay (2012).
Despite considerable differences among current constructional approaches to
language, Goldberg (2013) has identified four tenets (a–d) shared by all, and a further
tenet (e) shared by most such approaches. These are:
The Framework 3
(a) The basic unit of grammar is the construction, which is a conventional pairing
of form and meaning (see e.g. Lakoff 1987, Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor 1988,
Goldberg 1995, 2006).
(b) Semantic structure is mapped directly on to surface syntactic structure, with-
out derivations (see e.g. Goldberg 2002, Culicover and Jackendoff 2005).
(c) Language, like other cognitive systems, is a network of nodes and links
between nodes; associations between some of these nodes take the form of
inheritance hierarchies (taxonomic relationships capturing the degree to
which properties of lower level constructions are predictable from more
general ones, see e.g. Langacker 1987, Hudson 1990, 2007a).
(d) Cross-linguistic (and dialectal) variation can be accounted for in various ways,
including domain-general cognitive processes (see e.g. Bybee 2010, Goldberg
2013), and variety-specific constructions (see e.g. Croft 2001, Haspelmath 2008).
(e) Language structure is shaped by language use (see e.g. Barlow and Kemmer
2000, Bybee 2010).
In addition, all constructional approaches see grammar as a ‘holistic’ framework: no
one level of grammar is autonomous, or ‘core’. Rather, semantics, morphosyntax,
phonology, and pragmatics work together in a construction.
In the remainder of this book, we draw opportunistically on a number of insights
which have been proposed in the constructional accounts of language outlined below,
without adhering to one particular type of construction grammar. However, our views
are most compatible with those of Cognitive Construction Grammar (1.2.3) and Radical
Construction Grammar (1.2.4). We adopt a usage-based approach to language and
assume that linguistic structure is not innate and that it derives from general cognitive
processes. These processes are actions in which speakers and hearers engage, including
on-line production and perception. We will also be drawing on a closely related model
of grammar known as Word Grammar, developed by Richard Hudson (e.g. 2007a).
This model allows us to readily account for a crucial aspect of constructionalization:
association with and attraction to particular subparts of the language network. Word
Grammar will be very briefly introduced in 1.3, and discussed in fuller detail in chapter 2.
1.2.1 Berkeley Construction Grammar

The groundwork for construction grammar was laid by Fillmore in his work on case
grammar (e.g. 1968) and frame semantics. Fillmore coined the term ‘construction
grammar’ (Fillmore 1988) and he and his colleagues have been developing it since the
late 1980s exploring the hypothesis that some aspects of constructions might be universal.
Fillmore and his colleagues initially focused on idiosyncratic expressions and
idioms, e.g. let alone (Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor 1988), and the schema what’s
X doing Y, e.g. What’s this fly doing in my soup? (Kay and Fillmore 1999), having
observed the frequency of such kinds of expressions in naturally occurring speech
and writing, ‘and their centrality in the linguistic knowledge of speakers’ (Fillmore
2013: 111). The linguists involved in this research also discuss standard issues in syntax
and in cognitive linguistics, such as head structures, left dislocations, landmark,
direction and magnitude, and other more general constructions (Fillmore and Kay
1997), showing how ‘the same analytic tools account for both most basic structures
and these “special” cases’ (Fillmore 2013: 112). This variant of construction grammar
is highly formal. Atomic2 category types are represented as features, and assembled
into unified constructions.
1.2.2 Sign-Based Construction Grammar

A recent development of work in the Berkeley Construction Grammar framework is
Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG), e.g. Boas and Sag (2012). The main goal is
to provide a formalized framework in which researchers on typological issues can
develop testable hypotheses and reach increased common ground among construction
grammarians seeking to identify universal properties of language including recursion,
which often gets relatively short shrift in other models of construction grammar (Sag,
Boas, and Kay 2012). There is also a strong commitment to psychological reality (Sag
2012). This means that ‘linguistic proposals are motivated and evaluated in terms of how
well they comport with models of language use (e.g. production and comprehension),
language learning, and language change’ (Sag, Boas, and Kay 2012: 14, citing Croft 2000,
2001; Tomasello 2003; Goldberg 2006; Langacker 2000, 2009). The basic assumption is
that language is a sign-based system (see Saussure 1959[1916]). While the Saussurean sign
is a combination of form and meaning only, the SBCG sign embodies ‘at least phono-
logical structure, (morphological) form, syntactic category, semantics, and contextual
factors, including information structure’ (Sag 2012: 71). Signs are modeled as feature
structures. An informal preliminary representation of laughed is (Sag 2012: 75):
(1)
PHONOLOGY /læf–d/
SYNTAX V[fin]
SEMANTICS a laughing event situated prior
to the time of utterance
Full representations are complex in ways that we do not adopt. However, our
representations are expressed in terms of features like those in (1).
1.2.3 Cognitive Construction Grammar

A different, and earlier, development of the Berkeley Construction Grammar framework
is work by Lakoff (e.g. 1987) and Goldberg (e.g. 1995, 2006). Croft and Cruse (2004) call
2
‘Atomic’ elements are monomorphemic and not divisible into smaller form-meaning parts.
The Framework 5
this framework ‘Cognitive Construction Grammar’. Goldberg (1995) focuses on argu-

ment structure constructions such as the English ditransitive (‘double object’) construc-
tion (as in I gave/baked John a cake), the caused motion construction (as in Frank sneezed
the napkin off the table), and the way-construction (as in He elbowed his way through the
crowd). In her 1995 model, as in Fillmore’s approach, emphasis is primarily on patterns
not strictly predictable from their component parts, e.g. patterns illustrated by elbow
POSS way DIR,3 sneeze X off Y. Crucially in relation to argument structure, the objective
is to demonstrate commonalities among predicates in specific constructions: the con-
strual of the motion of the napkin brought about by the sneezing event is associated with
the more general English caused motion construction, not with the specific lexical
predicate sneeze (Goldberg 1995: 152, 224). In other words, such constructions are patterns
that ‘exist independently of lexical argument-taking predicates’ (Boas 2013: 235).
Goldberg (1995: 4) defined constructions as pairings of form and meaning where
some aspect of the form, or some aspect of the meaning, is not derivable from either
the combination of component parts, or from other pre-existing constructions. More
recently, she has expanded the concept of construction to embrace compositional
strings which ‘are stored as constructions even if they are fully predictable, as long as
they occur with sufficient frequency’ (Goldberg 2006: 5). A central feature of Gold-
berg’s construction grammar is that constructions are of any size, from complex
sentences down to inflectional affixes (Goldberg 2003, 2006). Language is argued to
be learned in chunks, and constructions are ‘learned pairings of form with semantic
or discourse function’ (Goldberg 2006: 5), which vary in make-up (from schematic,
through partially schematic, to wholly specified expressions), size, shape, and com-
plexity. The paradigmatic dimension of pattern match and choice is of equal if not
greater importance than the linear, syntagmatic one, and therefore similarities
between constructions play a significant role in the model.
The introduction of frequency in the definition of constructions raises interesting
questions for the nature of linguistic knowledge because establishing what level of
frequency is sufficient for pattern storage and entrenchment is problematic (see
Blumenthal-Dramé 2012 on this and other issues with ‘entrenchment’). It is particu-
larly problematic in historical work where the textual record is often minimal. The
necessary frequency for entrenchment is ‘gradual and relative, not categorical or
universal’ (Clark and Trousdale 2009: 38). We associate ‘sufficient frequency’ with
replication and conventionalization in the textual record.
Representations in Goldberg’s model involve at least two levels: SEM(antics) and
SYN(tax), as in (2), which is a representation of the GoVPbare construction as in Go
tell your sister to come here (based on Goldberg 2006: 54):
3
In chapter 2.7 we discuss why DIR is preferable to the more commonly used OBL for the way-
construction.
(2) SEM: Move in order to do an action

| |
SYN: V (go, come, run) VPbare
They may involve more levels, as in (3), in which the PRAG(matic) dimension of
negative evaluation is significant. (3) is a representative of a similar-looking but non-
motion GoVPing construction, as in Pat’ll go telling Chris what to do (Goldberg 2006:
53) which implies that the speaker has a negative attitude toward the action:
(3) PRAG: The action denoted by VP is construed negatively by the speaker
SEM: Action type

|
SYN: go [Ving …]VP
1.2.4 Radical Construction Grammar

Croft (2001) developed an approach that he calls Radical Construction Grammar.
This framework is explicitly concerned with the relationship between grammatical
description and language typology. In this model constructions are language-specific
and categories are defined language-specifically in terms of the constructions they are
in, e.g. ‘intransitive verb’ (VITR) is a category in the intransitive construction in
English, not in UG. Word classes such as ‘noun’ and ‘verb’ are to be understood in
relation to ‘constructions expressing propositional acts (referring expressions, predi-
cation constructions, modifying/ attributive constructions)’ (Croft 2013: 218).
Figure 1.1 shows how the links between form and meaning are represented in
Radical Construction Grammar terms:
CONSTRUCTION
syntactic properties
morphological properties FORM
phonological properties
symbolic
correspondence
link
semantic properties
pragmatic properties (CONVENTIONAL)
discourse-functional MEANING
properties
Figure 1.1 Model of the symbolic structure of a construction in Radical Construction

Grammar (Croft 2001: 18)
The Framework 7
Croft (2001: 19) considers semantic meaning to refer to a ‘conventionalized feature

of a construction’s function’, as do we, noting however that such features are not as
fine-grained as in models such as SBCG.
Croft’s model highlights the taxonomic nature of constructional knowledge, the
hierarchic inheritance relationship between more general and more specific con-
structions, and the importance of language use in determining aspects of language
structure. As Siewierska and Hollmann (2007) observe, a more fine-grained approach
to constructional knowledge is needed in cases of dialect variation, but the critical
issue here is that ‘no discrete universal construction types such as passive or coordin-
ation’ exist in this model for any variety of a language (Croft 2013: 227). As Croft
shows, gross traditional categories of voice such as ‘active’, ‘passive’ and ‘inverse’ fail
to do justice to the diversity of voice marking in human languages (Croft 2001).
1.2.5 Cognitive Grammar

The fifth approach to construction grammar to which we refer is what Croft and Cruse
(2004) call ‘Cognitive Grammar’ (e.g. Langacker 1987, 1991, 2005, and elsewhere). Lan-
gacker rejects the notion of a syntactic component of grammar and conceptualizes the
sign as linkage of semantic structure (S) and phonology (P) as in (4) (Langacker 2009: 3).
(4)
S
The absence of syntax in this model makes Langacker’s approach to constructions

significantly different from those of Fillmore, Croft, and Goldberg (see Langacker
2005) and from that taken here.4
‘Pivotal’ to Langacker’s model is the language user’s ‘ability to construe the same
situation in alternate ways’ (Langacker 2009: 6; bold original). Construal involves
perspective, specifically vantage-point and direction of mental scanning, as illus-
trated by the difference between come and go in (5a) and (5b) (Langacker 2009: 7):
(5) a. Come on up into the attic!
b. Go on up into the attic!
4
However, see Verhagen (2009) for a detailed analysis of the role of form in construction grammar
models. Verhagen concludes that the differences among the models with respect to the ‘intermediate’ level
of syntax and morphology are less extreme than is often argued.
It also involves degree of ‘specificity (or conversely schematicity) . . . the level of

precision and detail at which a situation is characterized’ (Langacker 2009: 6; bold
original), as can be seen by comparing specific use of upstairs in (6) with (5b):
(6) Come on upstairs into the attic!
We do not adopt Langacker’s focus on construal, and assign an important role to
syntax. Nevertheless, many of his ideas are foundational to the cognitive perspective
we adopt and to the concept of constructions as a network of symbolic units, as will
become apparent in subsequent chapters.
1.2.6 Our representation of constructions

Before leaving this section on how we think of constructions, it is necessary to
mention how we will represent them. As we have seen from the brief introduction
to different models of construction grammar above, representations of constructions
vary in the literature. In this book, unless we are citing other authors, we usually use
the basic template in (7):
(7) [[F] $ [M]]
Here F is short for Form; as needed we may specify SYN(tax), MORPH(ology), and
PHON(ology). M is short for Meaning; as needed we may specify DIS(course), SEM
(antics), and PRAG(matics). SYN, MORPH, PHON, DIS, SEM and PRAG are
‘features of a construction’, distinctions made in Croft (2001). DIS refers to what
Croft (2001) calls the ‘Discourse Function’ of a construction, such as information
structuring (e.g. resumptive topic), or connective function (e.g. conjunction). Note it
does not refer to discourse context (see chapter 5.3.6), but to the role in discourse, if
any, that a construction may express. In our notation, we typically specify those
features which are of particular relevance to the changes under discussion, i.e. which
are salient for our understanding of the variation and change involved. We do not
presuppose that these elements are necessarily cognitively salient for a given speaker
at a given point in time (cf. Goldberg 1995, Croft 2001 on the nature of specification in
synchronic construction grammars). The double-headed arrow, adopted from Booij
(2010), specifies the link between form and meaning, and the external brackets denote
that the form-meaning pairing is a conventionalized unit.
1.3 Networks and construction grammar

A recurrent theme in construction grammars is the metaphor of a ‘network’. For
example, Goldberg (2003: 219) suggested that ‘the totality of our knowledge of
language is captured by a network of constructions’ and Croft (2007a: 463) identifies
two fundamental principles behind construction grammar:
The Framework 9
(a) a pairing of complex structure and meaning,

(b) association of these pairings in a network.
This view of language structure is consistent with work in cognitive psychology,
which treats other aspects of knowledge (e.g. long term memory, Reisberg 1997) as
being organized as a network. One early line of thinking about networks focused on
semantics and the lexicon (e.g. Lakoff 1987; Brugmann and Lakoff 1988). For Lakoff
and for Brugmann the issue is primarily how to account for the many-to-many
relationships among lexical items. They propose that polysemies radiate out from a
prototype or ‘central meaning’ as extensions, e.g. the ‘central sense of over combines
elements of both above and across’ (Lakoff 1987: 419); more abstract meanings, as in
overlook, are metaphorical extensions based on this schema. However, most research
on networks from a construction grammar perspective concerns form as well. For
example, Fillmore relates lexical meanings to syntactic argument structure in what
has come to be known as the FrameNet model of constructions (Fillmore and Baker
2001, 2010). FrameNet is a lexical semantic database that specifies the semantic type
of a predicate, its semantic argument roles, and how they are realized syntactically,
e.g. the verb conclude in this model can be understood as representing either the
Activity-finish frame (8a) or the Coming-to-believe frame (8b):
(8) a. The game concluded in a draw.
b. Bill concluded that the game was a draw.
Crucial to the idea of a network are such concepts as nodes and the links between
nodes, ‘distance’ between members of a family, clusterings of properties, degrees of
entrenchment and accessibility of a construction. These have been developed in
considerable detail in Hudson (2007a), using a Word Grammar model that has
many commonalities with construction grammar (for useful overviews, see Hudson
2008, Gisborne 2011). Word Grammar is based on the Network Postulate that
‘Language is a conceptual network’ (Hudson 1984: 1, 2007a: 1). It is conceptual in
that it is cognitive, and a network in that it is a system of interconnected entities
(Hudson 2007a: 1). Here, as in sign-based approaches, we find a precursor in
Saussure. As Hudson (2007a) observes, networks were at the heart of the Saussurean
characterization of language as ‘a system of interdependent terms in which the value
of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others (Saussure
1959)’.5 The critical issues for our purposes are that cognitive networks—such as the
language network—are i) not limited to the lexicon as in Saussure’s work, and ii)
dynamic: ‘New links and new nodes are continually being established’ (Hudson
2007a: 53). Therefore values are always in flux.
5
This refernce is to Saussure (1959[1916]: 114).
We illustrate the idea of networks with a simple conceptual network in Figure 1.2
that shows associations between basic-level concepts (e.g. ‘ashtray’), and the more
schematic concepts that generalize over them (e.g. ‘furniture’). Borrowing in part
notation from Hudson’s Word Grammar (e.g. Hudson 2007a), the base of the
triangle lies alongside the supercategory, while the apex points to the subcategory.6
The lines are associations between concepts; an unbroken line represents a strong
association between an instance and a more general category.7 The reason that ‘chair’
has an unbroken line linking it to the category ‘furniture’ is that it is a central member
of that category. ‘Ashtray’ by contrast, is not a good example of ‘furniture’, though it
does share some properties with more central members of the category (e.g. an
ashtray is an item that is movable, and can be used to make a space suitable for
living; it is not, however, large, as most items of furniture are). ‘Piano’ illustrates the
concept of multiple inheritance—it has features associated with ‘furniture’ (and
indeed may be used by some purely as furniture, and not as a musical instrument),
but it is more centrally a member of the category ‘musical instrument’.8
manufactured item
furniture musical instrument
ashtray chair table … piano viola …
Figure 1.2 A small conceptual network
The network model contrasts sharply with other approaches to linguistic structure,
particularly some formalisms which have been used to account for grammaticaliza-
tion phenomena, such as Roberts and Roussou (2003), or diachronic syntax more
generally, such as Lightfoot (1999), which have adopted, by and large, an account of
6
As will become evident in chapter 2, we modify Hudson’s notational system in this book in order to
illustrate that we consider the nodes in the language network to be constructions; however, Hudson’s
system suffices here to show how mental concepts are linked in a network model.
7
It should be noted that broken lines (to represent weak associations between instances and the more
general category) are not part of the notational system of Word Grammar.
8
Inheritance is discussed more fully in chapter 2.4.2.
The Framework 11
linguistic knowledge which specifies properties of distinct modules (Fodor 1983) and
the interfaces between them. In cognitive linguistics, the network postulate does not
describe a part of language—it describes the entire architecture of language, such that
‘[e]verything in language can be described formally in terms of nodes and their
relations’ (Hudson 2007a: 2), and ‘language as a whole is a network in contrast with
the more traditional view of language as a grammar plus a dictionary’ (Hudson
2007b: 509). This has significant repercussions for the differences between cognitive
linguistics and modular accounts of language structure that not only distinguish
lexicon from grammar but also establish boundaries between pragmatics, semantics,
syntax and phonology (and sometimes also morphology).
We will discuss network models in detail in chapter 2 and suggest ways in which
Hudson’s and other concepts of ‘network’ are useful in thinking about sign change
(see also Gisborne 2008, 2010, 2011). The issue of how to assess ‘distance’ among
members of a network is central to arguments about the role of analogy and ‘best fit’
in change, and is addressed especially in chapter 3.3.5.
1.4 Constructions and factors relevant to them

In this section we outline how we think of constructions, and propose a broad-based
distinction between grammatical and lexical ones (1.4.1). We also discuss factors that
have been cited by Langacker (2005, 2008), Traugott (2007), Bybee (2010), and
Trousdale (2012a), among others, as relevant to the architecture of constructions:
schematicity, productivity, and compositionality (1.4.2).
1.4.1 Constructions characterized

Like Croft and Goldberg, we define a construction as a form-meaning pairing. This
pairing can be thought of in terms of various dimensions, all of them gradient.
Among them are size, degree of phonological specificity, and type of concept. Since
the arbitrariness of the sign entails idiosyncrasy, idiosyncrasy is present in a construc-
tion by default. Therefore we do not consider idiosyncrasy to be a special dimension.
There are, however, degrees of idiosyncrasy, and these need to be specified in a fine-
grained inventory of constructions. Finally, frequency is not considered as a factor
since ‘sufficient frequency’ is not operationalizable (see 1.2.3 above).
With respect to the dimension of size, a construction may be atomic or complex,
or in-between. Atomic constructions are monomorphemic, for example red, data,
un-, -dom, if, -s. Complex ones are units made up of analyzable chunks, e.g. pull
strings or on top of. Constructions that are in-between atomic and complex include
‘cranberry’ expressions like bonfire, which are partially analyzable—while fire is
recognizable, bon is not (for the history of bonfire < bone fire, see chapter 4.6).
The dimension of phonological specificity concerns whether a construction

is substantive, schematic, or in-between/intermediate. A substantive construction
is phonologically fully specified, e.g. red, dropout, -s, or may. A fully schematic
construction is an abstraction such as N or SAI (subject-auxiliary inversion). Many
schemas are, however, partial, by which is meant that they have both substantive and
schematic parts, e.g. V-ment (a word-formation construction illustrated by enjoy-
ment), what is X doing Y (what is that fly doing in my soup? ). In some models, a
construction is by definition complex and involves some degree of schematicity. For
example Bybee (2010: 9) defines a construction as a ‘form-meaning pairing that has
sequential structure’. Minimally a construction in Bybee’s view must also ‘have at
least one schematic category’ (p. 37). From a historical perspective, such a view of
constructions is too limiting since many synchronic sequences may become mono-
morphemic over time, and schematic properties may be lost. This is true both in the
lexical domain (cf. OE compound gar + leac ‘spear leek’ > ModE garlic; this is a relic
of a small X-leac construction, see chapter 4.6) and in the grammatical domain (cf.
OE complex be sidan ‘by side’ > ModE P(reposition) beside).
The dimension of type of concept concerns whether a construction is contentful
(‘lexical’) or procedural (‘grammatical’). ‘Contentful’ material can be used referen-
tially; on the formal dimension it is associated with the schematic categories N, V,
and ADJ. ‘Procedural’ material has abstract meaning that signals linguistic relations,
perspectives and deictic orientation (see Diewald 2011a on the indexical nature of
grammaticalization).9 In Terkourafi’s words, linguistic expressions encode proced-
ural meaning when they ‘contribute information about how to combine [ . . . ]
concepts into a conceptual representation’ (2011: 358–359). Such combinations
include indexical reference and information-structure marking (topic, definiteness,
etc.), argument-structure marking (case), and marking of temporal phase (aspect) or
of relationship to time of speaking (deictic tense). The formal dimensions with which
procedural meaning is usually linked are traditionally known as grammatical elem-
ents such as demonstrative, aspect, tense, and complementizer. However, the archi-
tecture of construction grammar puts lexicon and grammar on a ‘cline’ (Goldberg
and Jackendoff 2004: 532) or ‘gradation’ (Langacker 2011: 96). Some procedural
meanings, especially deictic ones, can be associated with referential contentful
meanings as well (e.g. main verb come and go). The distinction between contentful
and procedural components is not only gradient but subject to change, as has been
well established in the literature on grammaticalization where it has been shown that
9
Bybee (2002a) proposes that knowledge of grammar is procedural knowledge. The term ‘procedural’
was originally suggested by Blakemore (1987); we adopt it without intending any theoretical connection
with Relevance Theory. Another useful metaphor highlighting the role of grammatical items was used by
Von Fintel (1995: 184), acknowledging earlier work by Barbara Partee, when he proposed a formal
semantics of grammaticalization, and referred to grammatical meanings as ‘a sort of functional glue
tying together lexical concepts’.
The Framework 13
lexical material may come over time to serve grammatical functions (for example, the
lexical motion verb go came to be recategorized by speakers as part of the form of the
grammatical future construction BE going to). Since in construction grammar terms,
there is no ‘principled divide’ between lexical and grammatical expressions (Gold-
berg and Jackendoff 2004: 532), a constructional approach can enrich ways to think
about the transition from more lexical to more grammatical expressions. Prototypical
examples of contentful constructions are data, dropout, and of procedural ones are -s
(marker of present tense third person, or noun plural) or SAI. Examples of construc-
tions that are intermediate include the way-construction, which has contentful
properties such as the referential differences between force/elbow/giggle one’s way
through the room, but also procedural, aspectual ones (the construction, especially
with verbs of manner or accompanying action such as giggle, implies iteration, see
chapter 2.7).
In sum, the ‘constructicon’,10 or inventory of constructions, contains items that
have characteristics of all three dimensions mentioned above. In most cases, a
construction can be characterized on all three dimensions. For example, red is
atomic, substantive, and contentful, SAI is complex, schematic, and procedural.
Table 1.1 summarizes the dimensions:11
TABLE 1.1. Dimensions of constructions

Size Atomic Complex Intermediate
red, -s pull strings, on top of bonfire
Specificity Substantive Schematic Intermediate
dropout, -dom N, SAI V-ment
Concept Contentful Procedural Intermediate
red, N -s, SAI way-construction
1.4.2 Schematicity, productivity, and compositionality

Three factors, schematicity, productivity, and compositionality are often discussed in
the literature on construction grammar. How they are involved in various types and
stages of change will be discussed in more detail in later chapters. Here only the barest
characterizations of the key concepts and how we will use the terms are mentioned.
1.4.2.1 Schematicity Schematicity is a property of categorization which crucially
involves abstraction. A schema is a taxonomic generalization of categories, whether
linguistic or not. Kemmer says of schemas that they ‘are essentially routinized, or
10
The term appears to have originated with Jurafsky (1991).
11
We allow schemas to be atomic, e.g. N, V. It should be noted that Croft (2005) rejects the idea of
atomic schemas.
cognitively entrenched, patterns of experience’ (Kemmer 2003: 78), and Barðdal says
they can be viewed from a primarily psycholinguistic perspective (Barðdal 2008: 45).
Our approach is mainly linguistic (as in the work of Langacker, Bybee, and Croft).
In our view linguistic schemas are abstract, semantically general groups of construc-
tions, whether procedural or contentful, as discussed in the preceding subsection. They
are abstractions across sets of constructions which are (unconsciously) perceived by
language-users to be closely related to each other in the constructional network.
Degrees of schematicity pertain to levels of generality or specificity and the extent to
which parts of the network are rich in detail (Langacker 2009). For instance, starting
with the generalization, the concept ‘furniture’ is more abstract and inclusive than that
of ‘chair’ and the concept ‘chair’ in turn is more abstract than the concept ‘armchair’;
‘noun’ is more abstract than ‘count noun’. Alternatively, starting with the specific, a
‘dachshund’ is a ‘dog’ and a ‘dog’ is a ‘mammal’; an ‘intransitive verb’ is a ‘verb’, etc.
Linguistic schemas are instantiated by subschemas and, at the lower levels, of micro-
constructions: specific type-members of more abstract schemas, e.g. may is a micro-
construction of the subschema modal; modal is a subschema of the schema auxiliary.
Subschemas can be developed over time (e.g. subsets of peripheral modifiers of the NP,
Van de Velde 2011), or lost (e.g. subsets of ditransitive, Colleman and De Clerck 2011).
Growth and loss involve constructional changes before and after constructionalization.
In our view schemas and subschemas are the subparts of the linguistic system that
the linguist picks out for discussion and analysis. They are not meant to be mental
representations, though nothing prevents there being an overlap between such
representations and linguists’ categories. The schematicity of a linguistic construc-
tion is concerned with the extent to which it captures more general patterns across a
series of more specific constructions (Tuggy 2007, Barðdal 2008).12 Schemas are often
discussed, as in 1.4.1, in terms of slots and how symbolic structures are assembled
within them (see e.g. Goldberg 2006, Langacker 2008). For example, a construction
may consist entirely of abstract ‘schematic’ slots, like the form component of the
ditransitive schema [SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2], or it may be partially schematic in that it
contains a substantive construction as does the way-construction ([SUBJi [V POSSi
way] DIR]).
Goldberg hypothesizes that speakers have not only ‘item-specific knowledge’ about
particular expressions, but also ‘generalized or schematic knowledge’ about them
(2006: 98). Therefore it is reasonable to think about actual token expressions (con-
structs, e.g. I gave John a cake, I baked John a cake), individual type constructions
12
Indeed, the term ‘schematicity’ has also been referred to as ‘generality’ in Langacker (2008: 244) and
Trousdale (2008b). There are other definitions of schematicity. For example, in Bybee’s (2010) view
schematicity involves positions (p. 57) and filling them ‘by a variety of words and phrases’ (p. 25). She
also defines schematicity as ‘the degree of dissimilarity of the members’ (p. 67) and as degree of variation
within a category (p. 80).
The Framework 15
(e.g. X give Y Z) and also larger, schematic constructions that generalize over them.
In the case of the ditransitive ‘cause-receive’ construction Goldberg (2006: 20) defines
it as syntactic [SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2] linked with an agent understood to cause or
intend transfer of possession, as in (9) (based on Goldberg 2006: 20):
(9) SEM: CAUSE-RECEIVE Agt Rec(secondary topic) Theme
| | | |
SYN: Verb SUBJ OBJ1 OBJ2
This schematic construction abstracts over many instances of use and several
micro-construction types. Prototypical instances of the construction (e.g. I gave
John a bike) involve a perfect match between the lexical semantics of the verb, and
the constructional semantics; in other words, in the prototype ditransitive there is
semantic coherence and correspondence (see further Goldberg 1995: 35). Given the
polysemous nature of the constructional semantics, additional clusters of construc-
tions, or subschemas, exist, linked in a network to the central sense. For instance, in I
baked John a cake, the lexical semantics of bake X ‘cook X in an oven’ contribute part
of the meaning; another part of the meaning is contributed by the subschema with a
meaning ‘Agent intends to cause Recipient to receive Theme’. Other verbs, such as
refuse as in He refused me the log book, entail refusal to cause to receive. As Boas
(2013) observes, a potential problem with such abstract argument structure construc-
tions as (10) is that they have the capacity to overgeneralize, and sanction (or ‘license’,
‘allow access to’) unattested constructs. As we will argue in other parts of this book,
speakers often do overgeneralize and extend the boundaries of a particular construc-
tion. Such innovations may in time turn into linguistic change. In his analysis of the
English resultative construction, Boas (2005) suggests that individual verb senses may
not conform to the conventionalized pairing of form and meaning associated with
the more abstract construction they are said to instantiate. These pockets within the
network of English resultatives display their own idiosyncrasies, and ‘while very
broad generalizations are captured by Goldberg-type abstract meaningful construc-
tions, more limited conventionalized patterns are captured by more concrete con-
structions at various midpoints of the hierarchical network’ (Boas 2013: 239; see also
Croft 2003, which provides a detailed account of subclasses of ditransitives and a
critique of some of Goldberg’s 1995 assumptions about them).
In terms of schemas, cause-receive [[SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2] $ [cause to receive by
means of V]] is more schematic than the intend-cause subschema [[SUBJ bake OBJ1
OBJ2] $ [Intend to cause to receive by means of baking]], since the first generalizes
over verbs (V), while the second specifies a particular verb (bake) with general slots.
Conventionalized, entrenched schemas ‘sanction’ their subcases, that is, they con-
strain and specify the well-formedness of their subcases (Langacker 1987: 66).
Schematicity is gradient in two ways. For one, it is a ‘more or less’ factor, in that
well-formedness is a matter of convention and sometimes sanction is only partial. As
Langacker (1987: 69) says, ‘a considerable amount of nonconventionality is tolerated
(and often expected) as a normal feature of language use’. We will show that this
tolerance for nonconventionality is of great importance in change: partially sanctioned
extensions of an existing conventionalized construction may over time become fully
sanctioned instances of a more general, schematic construction, which has changed as
a result of the speaker/hearer’s experience with language.
A second way in which schematicity is gradable is in terms of the hierarchic
distinctions that can be made. Israel (1996) argued in his discussion of the develop-
ment of different subtypes of the way-construction that a distinction should be made
between specific verbs that can occur in the construction, clusters of types, and a
higher order representation ‘schematizing over prominent subsets of usages’ (p. 220).
Positing a hierarchically intermediate level (Israel’s ‘clusters of types’, our ‘subsche-
mas’) at least partially reflects the fact that language users appear to be sensitive to
generalized patterns as well as specific information (Bybee and McClelland 2005).
Seeking to maintain focus on both form and meaning, as suggested above,
we propose the following minimal set of constructional levels as a heuristic for
description and analysis of constructional change: schemas, subschemas, and
micro-constructions,13 but these are not absolute distinctions, and over time the
relationships between them may change as we discuss in later chapters. Micro-
constructions, in turn, are instantiated in use by ‘constructs’. Constructs are empiric-
ally attested tokens (e.g. attested I gave Sarah a book, She needed a lot of energy),
instances of use on a particular occasion, uttered by a particular speaker (or written
by a particular writer) with a particular communicative purpose. Constructs are very
rich, imbued with a great deal of pragmatic meaning, much of which may be
unrecoverable outside of the particular speech event. Spoken constructs contain
many specific phonetic features which are rarely replicated; every time one says
give or a lot of, for instance, the expression is likely to be pronounced slightly
differently, depending on the context. Written constructs are also empirically attested
tokens but, because of the medium, generalizations are made over phonetic detail.
Crucially, for a usage-based model, constructs are what speakers/writers produce and
what hearers/readers14 process. As usage events, they help to shape the mental
representation of language (Bybee 2010: 14). How they do so will be discussed in
chapter 2. Here we may mention that the consequence of production and processing
13
In earlier work (e.g. Traugott 2008a, b; Trousdale 2008a, 2010) we distinguished ‘macro-’, ‘meso-’, and
‘micro-constructions’. Schemas are roughly equivalent to macro-constructions, subschemas to meso-
constructions, so macro- and meso-constructions are redundant terms. They are not used in this book.
14
For ease of reading, henceforth ‘speaker’ will be used as a cover term for ‘speaker/ writer’ and ‘hearer’
for ‘hearer/reader’. The term ‘addressee’ is reserved for interlocutors who are deliberately addressed.
The Framework 17
is that the construct is the locus of individual innovation, and subsequent conven-
tionalization (adoption by a population of speakers). Constructional change begins
when new associations between constructs and constructions emerge over time, i.e.
when replication of tokens leads to provisional categorizations that were not available
to language-users before and can therefore be called ‘new’.
For any set of schemas in the constructional hierarchy that the linguist is describ-
ing the highest level will always be a (partial) schema. Since schemas abstract over
many micro-constructions, they are phonologically underspecified. Only micro-
constructions may be substantive and phonologically specified. Figure 1.3 further
summarizes and exemplifies the distinctions, using the example of the quantifier
construction. At the highest level, it includes all types of quantifier, whether indicat-
ing large, small, or intermediate quantity, or binominal and monomorphemic. At the
middle level of subschemas distinctions are made between large, small and inter-
mediate, and at the lowest level are various micro-construction types.
Schema (e.g. quantifier schema)
Subschema1 (e.g. large quant) Subschema2 (e.g. small quant)
Micro-Cxn1 Micro-Cxn2 Micro-Cxn3 Micro-Cxn4
many a lot of few a bit of
FIGURE 1.3 Gradient of hierarchic relationships among constructions
1.4.2.2 Productivity Productivity is a term that has been used in a number of

different ways. Barðdal (2008: chapter 2) provides a valuable overview and analysis
of a number of different uses of the term. In our view the productivity of a
construction is gradient. It pertains to (partial) schemas and concerns i) their
‘extensibility’ (Barðdal 2008), the extent to which they sanction other less schematic
constructions, and ii) the extent to which they are constrained (Boas 2008). In terms
of morphology we can think for example of the degree to which the combining of an
adjective plus -th sanctions the creation of new nouns. Nowadays this is considered
to be unproductive, since few new nouns are created by the formula [ADJ + th]. By
contrast, [ADJ + ness] is much more productive, and this schema sanctions a wide
range of less general forms, some more conventionalized than others (cf. truthiness,
truthlikeness, unputdownableness, and sing-along-able-ness, all recently attested in
on-line discourse). A similar situation holds for aspects of inflectional morphology.
Past tense in English is productively marked by affixation (e.g. play – played), but it is
sometimes marked by change in the stem vowel (e.g. drink – drank), a historical relic
of ablaut. When new verbs are introduced into the language, their past tense is
usually formed by the more productive and ‘regular’ method of affixation rather than
by the vowel change—the past tense of skype (‘to make a video call via the internet’) is
skyped, not, for example *skope (based on write-wrote).
Much work on productivity is concerned with frequency. Baayen (2001) and Bybee
(2003 and elsewhere) have importantly distinguished type frequency (the number of
different expressions a particular pattern has) from token frequency (the number
of times the same unit occurs in text). We equate construction frequency with type
frequency and construct frequency with token frequency. The definite article the in
English has a construction type-frequency of one, but it is the most token-frequent
construct in the contemporary language. When new constructions are formed, they
typically ‘spread by gradually increasing their frequency of use over time’ (Bybee and
McClelland 2005: 387). We understand ‘increase in frequency of use’ to mean increased
construct frequency: speakers use instances of the new construction more and more.
Here routinization, automatization (Pawley and Syder 1983; Haiman 1994) resulting
from frequent use and repetition are key factors. Increased collocational range, a
phenomenon that Himmelmann (2004) calls ‘host-class expansion’, is also a hallmark
of increased productivity. We consider this to be an increase in construction type-
frequency. For example, once BE going to was used as a marker of future it was extended
to more and more verb types. An approach to investigating this kind of change that is
grounded in construction grammar is diachronic distinctive ‘collostructional’ analysis
(e.g. Hilpert 2008, drawing on synchronic collostructional analysis developed in Gries
and Stefanowitsch 2004). Diachronic distinctive collostructional analysis uses corpus
data to track historical shifts in collocational patterns, that is, to track changes in the
items that fill constructional slots, e.g. changes in the verb types that follow BE going to,
and to identify the most attracted collocates in one period versus another:
Shifts such as these indicate developments in constructional meaning—as the construction
changes semantically, it comes to be used with different collocates. Newly incoming collocates
not only show that some change is underway; their lexical meanings further indicate how the
construction changes semantically. (Hilpert 2012: 234)
The collocates identified in collostructional analysis tend to come in sets. For

example, Hilpert (2008: chapter 3) shows that in the first seventy years of EModE
shall collocated with verbs of perception (understand, perceive) or appearance (show,
appear), and was extended in the second EModE period to administrative, legal acts
(forfeit, incur, offend). By contrast, will during the same period is favored first
with speech act verbs such as deny, confess, and then with an expanded set
including condemn, speak. Such expansion inevitably has an effect on ‘constructional
space’ and the competition between alternative constructions within a set, for
example, competing constructions may come to be preferred in particular ‘niches’
(Torres-Cacoullos and Walker 2009) or some may decline (Leech, Hundt, Mair, and
Smith 2009). As we will see in the chapters that follow, it is important to recognize
The Framework 19
that there is no predictable time-frame for the interaction of productivity and non-
productivity. Productivity may be short-lived while non-productive patterns may
persist for long periods of time (Nørgård-Sørensen, Heltoft, and Schøsler 2011: 38).
1.4.2.3 Compositionality Compositionality is concerned with the extent to which
the link between form and meaning is transparent. Compositionality is usually
thought of in terms of both semantics (the meaning of the parts and of the whole)
and the combinatorial properties of the syntactic component: ‘Syntax is compos-
itional in that it builds more complex well-formed expressions recursively, on the
basis of smaller ones, while semantics is compositional in that it constructs the
meanings of larger expressions on the basis of the meanings of smaller ones (ultim-
ately words, or rather morphemes)’ (Hinzen, Werning, and Machery 2012: 3).
According to Partee (1984: 281) in her discussion of compositionality, ‘the meaning
of an expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and the way they are
syntactically combined’. From a constructional point of view, compositionality is best
thought of in terms of match or mismatch between aspects of form and aspects of
meaning (see Francis and Michaelis 2003 on incongruence and mismatch). If a
construct is semantically compositional, then as long as the speaker has produced a
conventional sequence syntactically, and the hearer understands the meaning of each
individual item, the hearer will be able to decode the meaning of the whole. If it is not
compositional, there will be mismatch between the meaning of individual elements
and the meaning of the whole. Our approach is in line with that of Arbib:
language meaning is not entirely compositional, but language has compositionality in the sense
that the compositional structure of a sentence will often provide cues to the meaning of the
whole. (Arbib 2012: 475, italics original)
Consider example (10):

(10) If you’re late, you won’t be served.
While speakers of English learn compositional constructions of the type in (10), they also
have to learn that superficially very similar structures must be understood and analyzed
differently, and the form can be associated with a particular semantic value that does not
match the syntax (and is therefore less compositional). Thus speakers learn a pseudo-
conditional construction, with a pseudo-protasis and a pseudo-apodosis, as in (11).
(11) [I]f you’re Betty Ford right now, you’re probably thinking, you know, I hope
everybody’s OK. (Kay and Michaelis 2012: 2272)
In this case the construction is semantically non-compositional as it does not convey
a conditional about identity between Betty Ford and the addressee15 but rather an
15
You can also be used impersonally here in the sense of ‘someone’.
observation about Betty Ford and people like her. Some degree of hypotheticality is
cued by the conditional syntax.
Many utterances may be underspecified with respect to a compositional and a
non-compositional interpretation. Consider (12):
(12) My yoga instructor sometimes pulls my leg. (Kay and Michaelis 2012: 2274)
Users of English must learn that the expression pull someone’s leg has the non-
compositional meaning ‘tease someone’ in addition to the literal one. Construction
grammarians are interested in the extent to which such non-compositional meanings
pervade the grammar of a language, treat both compositional and non-compositional
examples as conventionalized pairings of form and meaning, and consider the non-
compositional set to be stylistically, pragmatically or semantically marked in various
ways. We will see that in many cases change over time results in reduced composi-
tionality, most especially at the micro-constructional level.
Bybee (2010: 44–5), citing Langacker (1987), makes a distinction between compo-
sitionality and analyzability, a distinction we will make use of in later chapters.
Bybee’s example is of English past tense forms like was, were, went, which are
semantically compositional but morphologically unanalyzable (and suppletive).
The concepts compositionality and analyzability are related, and both are gradient.
Analyzability, unlike compositionality, is not primarily associated with the imputed
match of the meaning of whole across the meaning of the parts of a composite
expression. Rather, it is concerned with the extent to which speakers recognize, and
treat distinctly, those component parts (see also Hengeveld’s 2011 concept of ‘trans-
parency’). An idiom like by and large ‘largely’ is less analyzable than an idiom like fly
off the handle ‘become unexpectedly angry’, and fly off the handle is less analyzable
than an idiom like spill the beans ‘reveal a secret’. By and large is least analyzable
because it has very little ‘internal’ structure (it has a phonological shape, but is highly
idiosyncratic in terms of morphology and syntax). Fly off the handle is less analyzable
than spill the beans because, while in both cases the verbs can be inflected, there is
more freedom in modifying the noun in the latter than in the former (e.g. spill the
political beans vs. *fly off the political handle). We consider analyzability to be a
subtype of compositionality and therefore do not treat it as a separate category.
1.5 A constructional view of change

In this section we expand on our view of change and especially on the distinction
between constructionalization and constructional changes (see section 1.1). This is a
distinction that has often not been made in other work on change from a construction-
alist perspective (see e.g. Hilpert 2013), or if it has been made the distinction is drawn
differently. For example, Smirnova (Forthcoming) identifies constructionalization with
initial changes and constructional change with later ones, and Boye and Harder (2012:
The Framework 21
35–36) define constructionalization as ‘the overarching change into a new whole con-
struction’, implying but not specifying difference from constructional change.
Constructionalization is defined and exemplified in 1.5.1, constructional change in
1.5.2, and the relationship between them is elaborated on in 1.5.3. But first it is
necessary to say a few more preliminary words about our view of change. As
indicated earlier, like Goldberg and Croft, we understand construction grammar as
a grammar of usage. From this perspective, linguistic change can be seen as ‘located
in speaker-interaction and . . . negotiated between speakers in the course of inter-
action’ (Milroy 1992: 36, italics original). It originates as change in use by speakers of
all ages (see e.g. Milroy 1992, Croft 2001), not solely or mainly by the child, as
suggested by e.g. Roberts and Roussou (2003). Bybee (2010: 196) makes the stronger
statement that children ‘are not the major instigators of change’ and change is not
primarily transmission across generations. Instead, ‘change is postulated to occur as
language is used rather than in the acquisition process’ (p. 9, italics added). Citing
Warner (2004), Bybee provides evidence that change occurs during an adult’s life-
time. Certainly adults innovate, but as change presupposes transmission to other
speakers, the main point in our view is that acquisition may occur throughout one’s
lifetime, whether in childhood or later in life. Indeed, when hearers of all ages adopt
structures transmitted by others, they acquire them. As Fischer (2010: 187) says, this
position does ‘not deny the influence of some formal system of grammar’ but
conceptualizes this formal system ‘as one that is transmitted culturally and not
genetically’. It should be emphasized that change never needs to occur. This follows
from a usage-based theory of change, since ‘language change’, including ‘sign
change’, does not exist on its own. Whether something changes or not is a function
of how people use language and of the way they evaluate certain expressions.
Constructions are sometimes discussed in terms of ‘wholes’, e.g. ‘a grammar is
composed of conventional associations of form and meaning, providing holistic
descriptions of complex signs’ (Fried and Östman 2004a: 24). However, construc-
tions have ‘internal dimensions’ (Gisborne 2011: 156), and, as we have seen, formal-
isms make use of multiple features. As will become apparent in this book, to account
for change, one must be able to account first for innovations that apply to particular
internal dimensions of a construction, and then for conventionalization of those
innovations among a group of speakers.
Foreshadowing fuller discussion in chapter 2, change begins with a new represen-
tation in the mind of a language user. The mechanism that brings about this new
representation is what is widely known as reanalysis, but is more properly called
‘neoanalysis’ (see 1.6.4.1 below, Andersen 2001: 231, ft.3), the modification of an
element of a construction. Neoanalysis often results from language-users’ (usually
unconscious) pattern matching, a process known as analogy, but more properly
thought of as ‘analogical thinking’. The recruitment of an item to a subschema that
may result from analogical thinking is a mechanism of change that we call ‘analogi-
zation’ (Traugott and Trousdale 2010: 38).
1.5.1 A characterization and example of constructionalization

In 1.1 we preliminarily defined constructionalization as the creation of a formnew-
meaningnew pairing, in other words, as the development of a new sign. Here we
provide a more elaborate characterization that will be further developed throughout
the book. Most particularly, the last point about gradualness versus instantaneity will
be developed in chapter 4:
Constructionalization is the creation of formnew-meaningnew (combinations of) signs. It forms new
type nodes, which have new syntax or morphology and new coded meaning, in the linguistic
network of a population of speakers. It is accompanied by changes in degree of schematicity,
productivity, and compositionality. The constructionalization of schemas always results from a
succession of micro-steps and is therefore gradual. New micro-constructions may likewise be
created gradually, but they may also be instantaneous. Gradually created micro-constructions
tend to be procedural, and instantaneously created micro-constructions tend to be contentful.
Minimally, constructionalization involves neoanalysis of morphosyntactic form and

semantic/pragmatic meaning;16 discourse and phonological changes may also be
implicated at various stages. Formal changes alone, and meaning changes alone
cannot constitute constructionalization. We characterize such changes as construc-
tional changes (see 1.5.2).
Gradual constructionalization requires prior constructional changes to have
occurred (the ‘succession’ of small-step neoanalyses). The new pairing of both
meaning and form is a new unit or sign. It is therefore a change to the system, i.e.
a type/node change. We can see its results in data when constructs begin to
be attested which could not have been fully sanctioned by pre-existing constructional
types. Typically, language-users may not be aware of the change having occurred
(Keller 1994), but sometimes there are metatextual comments made by grammarians
or others who observe change.
We focus on two main kinds of constructionalization, namely grammatical con-
structionalization, and lexical constructionalization. These are at the poles of the
contentful-procedural gradient discussed in 1.4.1 above. An example of lexical/con-
tentful constructionalization is the historical development of the modern English
word cupboard. Etymologically, two independent words were combined into the
compound cupboard, which was used to refer to a piece of wood (board) on which
cups were displayed. Over time, the compound underwent semantic change
(a cupboard is now a closed storage area in a home), and a shift in morphological
16
A set of exceptions relating to instantaneous lexical micro-constructions (e.g. initialisms such as
BBC) are discussed in chapter 4.8.
The Framework 23
status to a simplex form. In other words, it has become a new contentful conventional
symbolic unit, new both in semantics and in morphosyntax. These changes form part
of a succession of changes in meaning and in form, giving rise to a new semantically
non-compositional contentful form, shared by a population of speakers, that
emerged from a productive compounding pattern in the grammar. This was a
constructionalization. The multiple small changes involved in the medial consonant
cluster simplification of cupboard exemplify the kinds of changes which may take
place before but most especially after constructionalization has occurred.
In the case of cupboard the compound from which it derived was contentful and
referential, and the output of changes is a contentful, referential noun. Other series of
changes in form and meaning create constructions that encode grammatical form-
meaning pairs that differ from their lexical sources in being less referential, more
abstract and procedural. We illustrate this with reference to an example that we will
come back to several times, the changes that occurred in the development of English
binominal partitives meaning ‘a part/share of NP’ like a lot/bit/shred of a N into
grammatical quantifiers (Traugott 2008a, Brems 2003, 2010, 2011).17 Because we use
the example to illustrate several points in this chapter, the initial account here is quite
detailed. Nevertheless, here as elsewhere, we do not seek to be exhaustive. We intend
only to illustrate key points about the original and later constructions, the changes
involved, and our constructional approach to the changes in question.
In OE hlot ‘lot’ referred to an object, often a piece of wood, by which individuals
were selected, e.g. for office, often with appeals to God (cf. draw lots, lottery, lot ‘fate’),
and by metonymy to a share/unit of something gained by this means (cf. lot of land
(for sale)) or to fate that determined the selection (cf. one’s lot in life). (13) is an early
ME example of the partitive lot with of:
(13) He ne wass nohh wurrþenn mann . . . Forr to forrwerrpenn
he NEG was nothing become man . . . for to overthrow
aniʒ lott Off Moysæsess lare.
any part of Moses’ teaching
‘He (Jesus) did not become incarnate . . . to overthrow any part of Moses’
teaching’. (c.1200 Ormulum, 15186; [MED lot n1, 2c])
A part implies a quantity, and in the same Ormulum text we find use of lot with a
meaning close to ‘group’ (implying a fairly large quantity):
17
Strictly speaking, indefinite partitive expressions with this syntax are ‘pseudo-partitives’. There are
some distributional differences from expressions with definite NP2 (e.g. a piece of the pie), but in English
the differences are rather minimal. However, in many languages the two types are morphosyntactically
quite distinct, e.g. in Swedish the partitive is instantiated by the preposition av, while the pseudo-partitive is
zero (Selkirk 1977, Koptjesvskaya-Tamm 2009). Here we treat the two types of partitive together, although a
more restrictive, fine-grained distinction between pseudo-partitives and partitives would of course be
necessary for cross-linguistic comparison.
(14) Aʒʒ wass i þiss middellærd Summ lott off gode sawless.
always was in this middle-earth certain group of good souls
‘There was always in this world a group of good souls’. (c.1200 Ormulum, 19150
[MED lot n1, 2e])
The constructs aniʒ lott Off Moysæsess lare and Summ lott off gode sawless illustrate
referential, lexical uses of lot in constructions that are relational and therefore partially
grammatical. In both lot is the head and of NP2 is the modifier. In both lot refers to a
unit that is part of a larger whole. The schematic partitive construction, which has
several members, can be characterized in stream-lined fashion as:
(15) [[Ni [of Nj]] $ [parti – wholej]]
While (13) is fully compositional, (14) is less so, in that ‘group’ is an extension of
the literal meaning. However, lott in (14) is still contentful and referential. It cannot
mean ‘many’ because of the presence of the specific indefinite summ, cf. ‘a certain
group/some group of souls’, not ‘a certain many souls’. Clear evidence of the use of lot
meaning ‘unit consisting of several members’ is provided by (16) in which Austen
writes of Seward’s last remaining set (lot) of sheep, and of her father’s payment of
twenty-five shilling for each member of that set:
(16) You must tell Edward that my father gives 25s. a piece to Seward for his last lot
of sheep, and, in return for this news, my father wishes to receive some of
Edward’s pigs. (1798 Austen, Letter to her sister [CL])
This use of lot is still available, but is largely restricted to sale transactions. In the
eighteenth century we begin to find use of a lot of (and especially plural lots of ) in
contexts in which the pragmatic implicature from a unit/part to quantity seems likely
to have been inferred as salient:
(17) Mrs. Furnish at St. James’s has ordered Lots of Fans, and China, and India
Pictures to be set by for her, ‘till she can borrow Mony to pay for ’em. (1708
Baker, Fine Lady Airs [LION: English Prose Drama])
Here lots of can be understood as units for sale, and indeed since money is mentioned,
this may be what was intended, but it can also be understood as ‘large quantities of ’.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century we begin to find several examples
where a unit, partitive reading is incoherent and only a quantifier reading seems
appropriate, as in (18):
(18) a. Learning at bottom, physic at top!
Lots of business, lots of fun,
Jack of all trades, master of none!
(1833 Daniel, Sworn at Highgate [LION: English Prose Drama])
The Framework 25
b. He is only young, with a lot of power. (1895 Meredith, The Amazing

Marriage [CL 3])
While a lot of used as a partitive can be substituted by a unit/piece/share of, the
quantitative use is substitutable by much or many. With the partitive, number
agreement is with N1 (lot(s)), as in (19).
(19) the worthy Mr. Skeggs is busy and bright, for a lot of goods is to be fitted out for
auction. (1852 Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin [COHA])
By contrast, with the quantifier agreement typically is with N2. In (20a) agreement
with goods is evidenced by the pronoun them, in (20b) agreement with rags by the
pronoun they:
(20) a. I have a lot of goods to sell, and you wish to purchase them. (1852 Arthur,
True Riches [COHA])
b. pretty soon she brought down a lot of white rags. I thought they seemed
quite heavy for their bulk (1865 Alger, Paul Prescott’s Charge [COHA])
With the appearance of examples like (20) we can infer that constructionalization
has taken place. Not only has the meaning changed (partitive > quantifier), but so has
the constituent structure (form). Specifically there has been a neoanalysis of the head
relationship in the binominal that conforms to the essentially synchronic head
distinctions proposed in Aarts (1998) and Brems (2003). There has also been neo-
analysis of the preposition of as a phonological part of the quantifier. The neoanalysis
can be represented in various ways. One is (21) (based on Brems 2003: 289):
(21) a lot of land (for sale) a lot of land/love
Head Modifier Modifier Head
Another, which we adopt here, is:18

(22) [[Ni [of Nj]] $ [parti – wholej]] > [[N of] Nj]] $ [large quant – entityj]]
The succession of changes exemplified by partitive a lot > quantifier a lot of resulted
in a grammatical constructionalization, the development of a formnew-meaningnew
micro-construction that is more grammatical than its source because NP a lot has
18
See Traugott (2008a, b) for an earlier version.
lost its contentful meaning and its prototypical nominal potential, and become a
procedural both in meaning (quantifier) and in structure (modifier).
As was mentioned in 1.4.1 and will be discussed below in 1.6.3 and elsewhere, in
addition to constructionalizations that are either contentful/lexical or procedural/
grammatical, there are also changes that result in part-contentful part-procedural
constructions; we call these ‘intermediate’ or ‘hybrid’ constructions. One subtype of
the complex predicate construction, illustrated by give someone a kicking, is partially
ditransitive, partially iterative, and therefore partly grammatical/procedural, but it is
also partially contentful/lexical as it may refer to verbal assault (Trousdale 2008a).
In this book we will argue that the various types of constructionalization involve
different kinds of changes with respect to schematicity, productivity and composi-
tionality. We will also argue that the products of constructionalization may result
in changes in schemas and subschemas. Furthermore, there may be differences
with respect to gradualness of development. While developments of schemas,
subschemas, and grammatical micro-constructionalizations are gradual, lexical
micro-constructionalizations may be instantaneous, as illustrated by recent construc-
tionalizations such as ebrary, Romnesia.
1.5.2 Constructional changes

Gradual constructionalization is preceded and followed by a succession of conven-
tionalized incremental steps, which we call constructional changes:
A constructional change is a change affecting one internal dimension of a construction. It does
not involve the creation of a new node.
In the example of the development of binominal quantifiers, first there was a

pragmatic ‘invited inference’ of quantity, in other words the kind of implicature that
arises in the flow of speech and may enable changes in meaning (for details see
Traugott and König 1991, Traugott and Dasher 2002).19 We can infer that in the case
of a lot of in the partitive construction (and also of others in the set such as a bit/shred
of ) the pragmatic inference came to be salient among a group of speakers and was
semanticized, that is, it became encoded such that a lot of was used in contexts such
as (18) where ‘part, unit’ makes no sense. This semanticization did not ‘need’ to occur,
as can be seen by comparing a piece/pieces of, which did not come to be used with the
meaning much/many in Standard English (*I had a piece of anxiety). The changes
involved were specific to a subset of partitive constructions and initially involved only
19
The term ‘invited inference’ is designed to emphasize the negotiation of meaning between the
speaker, who (usually unconsciously, see Keller 1994; also Hagège 1993) ‘invites’ interpretations and the
hearer who infers/interprets. It allows, but does not require, the possibility that speakers design their
utterances pragmatically. A related term ‘context-induced interpretation’ (Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer
1991) emphasizes interpretation by the hearer.
The Framework 27
meaning and some distributional extension to nouns with different semantic content.
At this point there was mismatch between form and meaning, since the syntactic
head was that of the partitive (NP1), while the semantic head was that of the modifier
(NP2). We cannot tell that constructionalization has occurred until morphosyntactic
changes appear in the textual record as well as semantic ones. In the example under
discussion, evidence for constructionalization is provided by verb agreement with
NP2 showing that it is the head syntactically and semantically. In this case the
mismatch between semantics and syntax can be said to have been ‘resolved’ by
negotiations between Speaker and Addressee (or unconsciously between Speaker
and Hearer), resulting in a new pairing that provides a more transparent reading:
‘quant-entity’ is matched with surface binominal syntax.20 Even so, the quantifier
string a lot of has to be learned as a non-compositional unit. Even so, there is still a
degree of analyzability (e.g. lot can still be pre-modified, as in There’s going to be a
whole lot of trouble). Lack of total freezing is unsurprising given that unambiguous
quantifier use of a lot of is not frequently attested until the nineteenth century, and
analyzability is gradient.
1.5.3 The relation of constructional changes to constructionalization

Constructional changes that can be hypothesized by the analyst to precede and
enable or ‘feed’ constructionalization typically involve expansion of pragmatics,
semanticization of that pragmatics, mismatch between form and meaning, and
some small distributional changes. We call these ‘pre-constructionalization construc-
tional changes’ (PreCxzn CCs for short). In turn, constructionalization may feed
further constructional changes. Such ‘post-constructionalization constructional
changes’ (PostCxzn CCs for short) typically involve expansion of collocations, and
may also involve morphological and phonological reduction. For example, once the
micro-construction [[a lot of] $ [large quant]] had come into existence its collocates
expanded exponentially and it has recently been subject to various phonological
reductions. Langacker (2009: 79) regards a lot of as monomorphemic in contemporary
English, although for most speakers its earlier internal structure may still be accessible
(as attested by its analyzability), and predicts that it may become fully grammaticalized
as alotta (p. 77). This hypothesized reduced form is attested on-line in the form allota:
20
Focusing on the example of a bunch of, Francis and Yuasa (2008) zero in on its collective meaning,
which may be construed in terms of either bundle or quantity, and argue that while semantic reanalysis has
taken place, syntactic reanalysis has not. They argue that the quantifier is still mismatched in PDE because
the syntax continues to be partitive (NP1 is still syntactic head). They discount agreement evidence on the
grounds that a bunch of and even a lot of can have ‘group’, i.e. collective meanings, and collectives in
English show variation in agreement patterns (cf. the committee is/are X). However, spellings as in What a
buncha losers (Urban Dictionary buncha) suggest that for some speakers a bunch of has been neoanalyzed.
Furthermore, Francis and Yuasa’s analysis works less well with a bit/shred of than with a bunch of since
these are not collectives and do not have group meanings. Also, the greater phonological reduction of the
quantifier than of the partitive cannot be accounted for on their view.
(23) That’s allota ducks

(http://brookelynmt.blogspot.com/2010/03/thats-allota-ducks.html; March 31
2010. Accessed Sept 12th 2010)
Urban Dictionary has an entry for a lotta. There are also several sites on the
internet devoted to clarification of the ‘correct’ spelling and distinguishing it from the
verb allot, a sure sign of a change (of which people are aware). Although spellings like
this are cues to internal fusion, they cannot be used as diagnostic of it since spelling
can be highly conventional on the one hand or highly idiosyncratic on the other,
especially in the on-line environment. However, partitive a lot (in so far as it is still
used) is phonologically distinct from the quantifier; only the latter can be reduced.
Abbreviating constructionalization as Cxzn, and symbolizing the feeding relationship
by ##, we may summarize the succession of changes involved in constructionaliza-
tion as in (24):
(24) PreCxzn CCs
↓↓
Cxzn
↓↓
PostCxzn CCs
This succession of changes may be recursive, in that PostCxzn CCs may enable
further constructionalization. Examples include the development of procedural con-
structions such as the subordinator beside(s) from a prepositional phrase ‘by side’ and
further constructionalization of besides as a pragmatic marker (see chapter 3.2.3) and
the development of word-formations such as -ræden ‘status’ (chapter 4.5.2).
The model has much in common with the models of grammaticalization in
context proposed by Heine (2002) and Diewald (2002), but applies to lexical as
well as to grammatical changes. Both authors identify developments prior to gram-
maticalization that involve at least pragmatics. One of the differences between the
models is whether there are also morphosyntactic developments prior to grammati-
calization. Another is whether changes after grammaticalization are specified in the
model. The point at which grammaticalization of a particular element is inferred to
have taken place is called a ‘switch’ context by Heine, and an ‘isolating’ one by Diewald.
In our model of gradual constructionalization, there is a succession of developments;
we expect that such a succession will involve changes in meaning or form or in both.
There is also usually a succession of changes after constructionalization involving
expansion of contexts (see Himmelmann 2004), but also loss of various kinds. The
differences between pre- and post-constructionalization CCs will be discussed in more
The Framework 29
detail in later chapters, including the suggestion that the steps may be probabilistically
predictable based on the original structure (De Smet 2012).
We emphasize that ‘pre-constructionalization’ can only be assessed with
hindsight—nothing of which we are aware predicts that certain constructional
changes will necessarily lead to a constructionalization. However, observed construc-
tionalization can be seen to have arisen from a number of small local changes in
the context, as for example, development of uses of lot that mean ‘unit’ or ‘group’,
and of ambiguous constructs, and we can with hindsight call these changes pre-
constructionalizations.
Initially, constructional changes and constructionalizations are local, affecting
particular micro-constructions. However, some of these changes can be seen as
part of larger systemic shifts. For example, a precursor of the form of the partitive
a lot of NP is in English a ‘possessive genitive’ in which the modifier was marked with
genitive case as in (25). It could precede or follow the head.
(25) On Fearnes felda gebyrað twega manna hlot landes in to
In Fearn’s field extend two men’s parcel land.GEN in to
Sudwellan.
Southwell
‘In Fearn’s field extend a parcel/share of land large enough for two men into
Southwell’. (Ch 659 (Birch 1029) [DOE])
By later ME the case system had broken down, word order was relatively fixed, and
articles had come into being. Possessives of any type, whether partitive (a lot of land),
possessive (king of England), kinship relation (mother of my daughter), etc. were
typically expressed by of (originally meaning ‘out of ’), and the order was fixed as
Head–Modifier.21 Furthermore, a was used to mark indefinites with singular count
nouns in any NP. These are systemic changes, not particular to a lot or even to
partitives.
1.5.4 Instantaneous constructionalization

As discussed, a crucial aspect of most constructionalization is that it involves a
succession of micro-steps preceding the creation of the new node. While all micro-
steps are instantaneous in an individual mind, and an individual constructionaliza-
tion is instantaneous, the constructional changes which precede the new node
creation are gradual in the sense that they occur in a succession of micro-steps.
However, some new constructions are created with no prior constructional changes
discernible. Invoking the network metaphor introduced in section 1.3, we call these
21
However, retention of the -s genitive and Modifier–Head order with animates (my daughter’s mother)
is at least in ME a residual use of case (with -s selected in lieu of all other possible genitive forms), i.e. a
constraint on case loss and reorganization.
on-the-spot changes instantaneous type node creations; for instance, words like
sushi, table, or devour may be borrowed instantaneously as form-meaning pairs.
Although they have histories among the speakers from whom they are borrowed
(and may be subject to constructional changes after borrowing), they are not the
outcome of small-step changes in the target language at the time they are borrowed.
Borrowings are found primarily in the lexical domain. Occasionally, however,
morphology may be borrowed, especially derivational morphology (e.g. -ity, -able/-ible)
(see McMahon 1994: chapter 8); in this case sequential change may occur, since
morphemes are usually borrowed initially with their base, and only gradually
come to be used with other bases, eventually leading to a word-formation schema.
Other examples of on-the-spot changes are the output of ‘conversion’, a word-
formation strategy that allows speakers to use e.g. a noun as a verb instantaneously
(e.g. to calendar/google/window). Yet others are acronyms such as wags (‘wives and
girlfriends’, usually of sportsmen, particularly footballers) or scuba (‘self-contained
underwater breathing apparatus’). Most words that are invented, many of them
brand names such as Xerox, likewise do not involve any formal or functional changes
prior to the new lexical construction being created. Nevertheless, some coined words
may be on a continuum—quark, for example, though supposedly invented by James
Joyce, resonates with question, quest, and other interrogatives, and therefore has a
partial link with extant exemplars. We explore the issue of instantaneous micro-
constructional type node changes in more detail in chapter 4.8.
1.6 Diachronic work particularly relevant to this book

In much previous work in diachronic linguistics, there has been a tendency to think
of semantic, syntactic, morphological or phonological changes as largely independ-
ent, autonomous, and modular phenomena. However, recent research on interfaces
between pragmatics and syntax (e.g. Hinterhölzl and Petrova 2009, Meurman-Solin,
López-Couso, and Los 2012), syntax and stress patterns (e.g. Schlüter 2005, Speyer
2010), or prosody and semantics (e.g. Wichmann, Simon-Vandenbergen, and Aijmer
2010) has suggested that ‘pure’ changes, e.g. syntactic changes, are a construct of
theories and methodologies, rather than realities of language use. A usage-based
constructional approach, which argues that a grammar, in the sense of a linguistic
knowledge system, is made up of form-meaning pairings, or signs, shifts the focus to
links between form and meaning changes.
In this section we discuss how the term ‘construction’ was used and sometimes
continues to be used in historical linguistics, especially in work on grammaticalization.
We also outline some key points about grammaticalization and lexicalization that are
necessary for understanding our view of grammatical/procedural and lexical/contentful
constructionalization, and provide a very brief overview of work in construction gram-
mar that adopts a historical view, but is not restrictive in the way adopted in this book.
The Framework 31
1.6.1 ‘Construction’ as used in earlier historical linguistics

The term ‘construction’ has been widely used during the past two decades in the
literature on morphosyntactic change. It is not always clear what this term is meant
to refer to. Usually it is not a form-meaning pairing in the constructionalist sense but
rather a phrase or constituent, or the syntactic context in which a grammatical item
develops. This in part reflects the tradition of Latin grammars, in which constructio
was used to translate Greek sýntaksis ‘syntax’. Indeed ‘construction’ in historical
linguistics has in the past been associated mainly or even exclusively with syntax, not
lexicon; extension to the latter is largely associated with construction grammar
perspectives.
A fundamental concept in historical linguistics has been that change occurs in
context and this context has often been called a ‘construction’. Implications of this
concept will be discussed in detail in chapter 5. The insight is that changes identified
as instances of grammaticalization do not occur independently of linguistic context,
e.g. in the development of Latin dare habes ‘give:INF have:2Sg’ into 7thC daras ‘give:
FUT’ (Fleischman 1982: 68), the main verb stem da- undergoes no morphosyntactic
change.22 It is habe- that undergoes change in the context of a prior nonfinite verb.
Therefore:
[G]rammaticalization does not merely seize a word or morpheme . . . but the whole construc-
tion formed by the syntagmatic relations of the elements in question. (Lehmann 1992: 406)
Here ‘construction’ is clearly a syntactic notion and refers to a syntactic string or

constituent. However, in the work of Bybee and her colleagues the term can be
understood to have a meaning closer to the form-meaning pairing of construction
grammar:
It is the entire construction, and not simply the lexical meaning of the stem, which is the
precursor, and hence the source, of the grammatical meaning. (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca
1994: 11)
In so far as Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca hypothesize that ‘the development of

grammatical material is characterized by the dynamic coevolution of meaning and
form’ (p. 20), they appear to have in mind a grammar in which form-meaning
pairings play a central role. However, they do not provide a theoretically articulated
view of such a grammar.
In general, it can be assumed that authors who use the term ‘construction’ do not
have constructionalist accounts in mind unless they explicitly align themselves with
construction grammar. This includes publications by the first author of this book
prior to 2007, most especially Traugott (2003).
22
For discussion and exemplification of daras, see chapter 2.5.1.3.
The changes that have been the focus of attention in work on constructional
change have been of the type that have widely come to be known as grammaticaliza-
tion. It is to the latter that we now turn.
1.6.2 Grammaticalization
Grammaticalization, and how aspects of it can be accounted for within grammatical
constructionalization, is the topic of chapter 3. Suffice it here to say that grammatica-
lization has been broadly defined as ‘The creation of grammatical categories’ (Lehmann
2004: 183),23 and refers to the coming into being of grammatical markers such as case,
tense, aspect, modality, mood, and connectives, etc. Standard examples include:
(26) a. Latin cantare habeo ‘sing:INF have:1sg’ > French chanterai ‘sing:FUT:1sg’.
(Fleischman 1982: 71)
b. Old Hungarian világ bele ‘world core/guts:directional’ > világbele ‘into the
world’ > világba (inflected N bele > case marker ba). (Anttila 1989: 149,
Lehmann 1995: 85)
c. OE an ‘one’ > a ‘indefinite article’. (Hopper and Martin 1987)
d. OE ænlice (an ‘one’ + lice ‘having the form of ’) > only ‘adverbial exclusive
focus marker’. (Nevalainen 1991a)
At the risk of polarizing, there are currently two major views of grammaticaliza-
tion (see Traugott 2010a for an overview). In the first tradition, grammaticalization is
construed as involving increase in dependency and reduction of various aspects
of the original expression (see e.g. Lehmann 1995, Haspelmath 2004). Many of
the changes discussed are at least in part morphological, like (25a, b). We call this
the tradition of ‘grammaticalization as reduction and increased dependency’. In the
second, for the most part, more recent, tradition, grammaticalization includes expan-
sion of semantic-pragmatic, syntactic, and collocational range (Himmelmann 2004).
Many of the changes discussed in this tradition are syntax- and discourse-related as
well as morphological. Therefore examples like those in (27) are discussed in addition
to those in (26). (27a) exemplifies the development of pragmatic markers, (27b) that
of specificational information-structuring:
(27) a. say (imperative of main verb say) > ‘for example, suppose’ (Brinton 2006:
89); only ‘exclusive focus marker’ > ‘except, discourse-connective’. (Brinton
1998, Meurman-Solin 2012)
b. All I did was to X (‘everything I did was for the purpose of X’) > All I did was
X (‘the only thing I did was X’). (Traugott 2008c)
We call this the tradition of ‘grammaticalization as expansion’.
23
Lehmann does, however, express concern that this view may encompass too much.
The Framework 33
The differences in approach depend in part on what the researchers’ view of

‘grammar’ is. For example, restrictive accounts of grammar typically do not include
pragmatic markers, and prior to work on comparative syntax initiated by Rizzi (1997)
they usually did not include information structure. It also depends on whether the
focus is on structural changes, which may involve reduction not only of form but also
of contentful meaning (‘bleaching’), or on the consequences of this reduction for use
in terms of increased productivity and frequency of use. For example, Lehmann’s
(2008) work on changes in contrastive information structuring highlights reduction
from two to one clause, while Traugott’s (2008c) on the development of pseudo-clefts
highlights increase in the types of context available. Since construction grammar is
all-inclusive and includes pragmatic markers within grammar, a non-restrictive view
of grammaticalization is consistent with construction grammar. And since the type of
construction grammar adopted here is usage-based, it is consistent with grammati-
calization as expansion as well as reduction. In the course of this book we will show
that expansion and reduction are not orthogonal, but intertwined during change.
1.6.3 Lexicalization
The term lexicalization is usually understood rather differently in the synchronic and
diachronic linguistic literature, although in both perspectives the domain of research
is coding of substantive, contentful meaning (Brinton and Traugott 2005).
For many synchronic researchers, ‘lexicalized’ means ‘has a segmental expression’.
Most notably, in Talmy’s work (e.g. 1985, 2000) ‘lexicalization’ is used for packaging
or encoding of cognitive scenarios such as motion, path, and manner. In particular,
he is concerned with the conflation of semantic path and manner/cause of motion.
He distinguishes Chinese and all branches of Indo-European except Romance, as
languages that ‘lexicalize’ Motion + Manner/Cause together and treat Path as satellite
(e.g. The rock slid down the hill [slide = Motion + Manner (coasting on a slippery
surface), down the hill = Path]). By contrast Romance, Semitic, Polynesian, Atsugewi,
and Navajo encode Motion + Path and are said to treat Manner as satellite (e.g.
Spanish la botella entró a la cueva flotando ‘the bottle entered the cave floating’).
Interestingly, Latin, the putative predecessor of Romance, like English, encoded
Motion + Manner/Cause. Most recently, Beavers, Levin, and Tham (2010) have
gathered together many cross-linguistic studies that show Talmy’s original typology is
overly simplistic: motion, path, and manner/cause may be packaged in a number of
different ways in most languages for a variety of reasons including contact and
borrowing. Beavers, Levin, and Tham argue that complexity of expression and biases
in the lexical inventories of languages lead to the preferences Talmy, and others after
him, have identified. This kind of lexical encoding has been little studied from a
diachronic perspective, and will not be pursued further in this book (but see suggestions
in Slobin 2004, and for specific studies see Stolova 2008, Forthcoming, Fanego 2012a).
In the historical literature the term ‘lexicalization’ was used for a while with
reference to some putative counterexamples to grammaticalization (‘degrammatica-
lization’), specifically the use of grammatical expressions such as up as full verbs or of
if, and and but as nouns in ifs, ands and buts (see e.g. Ramat 1992, Campbell 2001,
Van der Auwera 2002). As discussed in chapter 4.9, these are no longer considered
counterexamples to grammaticalization (see e.g. Lehmann 2004, Norde 2009).
Rather, they are instances of the word-formation known as conversion whereby
any linguistic element, including a sound, can be made into a member of a major
contentful category, in English typically a noun or sometimes a verb.
Lexicalization has also been understood as in many ways similar to grammatica-
lization construed as reduction (see Brinton and Traugott 2005), in that it involves
increased coalescence, fusion, and univerbation (Lehmann 2004). From this perspec-
tive, in lexicalization ‘a complex lexeme once coined tends to become a single
complete lexical unit’ (Lipka 2002), e.g.:
(28) a. OE god ‘good’ + spell ‘message’ > gospel.
b. OE neah ‘near’ + gebur ‘dweller’ > neighbour.
c. ME cup ‘cup’ + board ‘shelf ’ > cupboard ‘storage space’.
Rather more challenging are examples such as those in (29):
(29) a. He curried favour with the boss ‘He ingratiated himself with the boss’.
b. He paid attention to the speech ‘He attended to the speech’.
Here it is not possible to describe the new construction as ‘a single complete lexical
unit’; rather it is a non-compositional, complex construction, and the meaning of the
whole is primarily contentful (see ‘ingratiate oneself with someone’). More challen-
ging still are the examples in (30):
(30) a. He had a shower ‘He showered’ (not ‘He owned a shower’).
b. He took a walk ‘He walked’.
As Brinton (2008b) has argued, composite predicates such as the examples in (30)
display properties which appear to be partly lexical and partly grammatical. The light
verbs give and have + deverbal N in such examples have an idiosyncratic and partially
lexical meaning, but they also appear to have evolved in English as markers of telic
(end-point oriented) aspect. In this respect they are grammatical. Finally, and yet
more intricate, are examples like those in (31):
(31) a. He gave them a talking to ‘He berated them’.
b. He gave them a kicking ‘He assaulted them’.
It is not simply the case that He gave them a talking to is the atelic equivalent of
He talked to them as the -ing might suggest. Rather, a more lexical interpretation is
incorporated in constructs such as those in (30), with an added general sense of
The Framework 35
physical assault or verbal castigation (Trousdale 2008a). Complex examples like this
are considered briefly in chapters 4 and 6.
1.6.4 Mechanisms of change

A major question in historical linguistics is how language users add alternative
mental representations of an expression over time. The usual approach, outlined
here, is to refer to ‘mechanisms’ (the ‘how’) of change, contrasted with ‘motivations’
(the ‘why’ of change). The latter ‘Motivations’ can be understood in various ways,
some sociolinguistic, such as prestige. Here we refer to cognitively-based motivations,
such as analogical thinking and acquisition, as well as communicative ones, including
wanting to present oneself as in some way unique or noticeable (or as a member of a
group). ‘Mechanisms of change are processes that occur while language is being used,
and these are the processes that create language’ (Bybee 2001: 190). The search has
been for a small set of such mechanisms:
By postulating a finite set of mechanisms attributable to human neuromotor, perceptual, and
cognitive abilities, which interact with linguistic substance in acquisition and in language use, a
range of possible language structures and units will emerge. (Bybee 2001: 190)
The primary mechanism of change discussed in the grammaticalization literature

has been ‘reanalysis’ (our ‘neoanalysis’) where the focus is on difference from the
source. More recently, attention has been paid to ‘analogy’, where the focus is on
matching of the original source with some extant construction that is considered to
be similar in some respect, and is treated as an exemplar.24 We explain below why we
prefer the terms ‘neoanalysis’ to ‘reanalysis’ and ‘analogization’ to ‘analogy’. We will
return to the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of change in chapter 2 with a more fine-grained set of
hypotheses about processes involved in change.
1.6.4.1 Neoanalysis (‘reanalysis’) In his much-cited article of 1912 in which he
introduced the term ‘grammaticalization’, Meillet famously said:
Tandis que l’analogie peut renouveler le détail des formes, mais laisse le plus souvent intact le
plan d’ensemble du système existant, la ‘grammaticalisation’ de certains mots crée des formes
neuves, introduit des catégories qui n’avaient pas d’expression linguistique, transforme l’en-
semble du système. ‘While analogy can renew details of forms, but usually leaves the structure
of the existing system intact, “grammaticalization” of certain words creates new forms,
introduces categories that had no linguistic expression beforehand, transforms the system as
a whole’. (Meillet 1958[1912]: 133)
24
Harris and Campbell (1995) cite borrowing as a third mechanism in addition to reanalysis and
analogy in morphosyntactic change. Important though the issue of contact in language change and
especially grammaticalization is (see Heine and Kuteva 2005, Schneider 2012) we will not be addressing
it here. Bybee (2003) treats frequency as a mechanism. In our view it is not a mechanism, but an
epiphenomenon of routinization and schematization, etc.
Meillet did not use the word ‘reanalysis’. This is a term developed in the 1970s.
A definition given by Langacker for reanalysis in morphosyntactic change has proved
foundational: ‘change in the structure of an expression or class of expressions that
does not involve any immediate or intrinsic modification of its surface manifestation’
(Langacker 1977: 58). An example of such a shift that is not manifest in a major
modification of surface manifestation is the Head + Modifier > Modifier + Head shift
proposed for binominal partitives > binominal quantifiers discussed in 1.5.1 above.25
Harris and Campbell (1995: 50) interpret ‘structure’ in Langacker’s characteriza-
tion as ‘underlying structure’, and say this includes ‘at least (i) constituency, (ii)
hierarchical structure, (iii) category labels, and (iv) grammatical relations’. Lat.
cantare habeo > Fr. chanterai (25a) (which represents stages far apart and therefore
exhibits surface manifestation of the reanalyses) illustrates constituency change
(a phrase has become a word) and changes in category labels (the main verb of
possession habe- has become a future affix). Since Langacker (1977) the notion of
reanalysis has been extended from morphosyntactic to semantic and phonological
change (see e.g. Eckardt 2006 and Bermúdez-Otero 2006 respectively).
There are, however, some problems with ‘reanalysis’. One is terminological. If a
language user who has not yet internalized the construction in question, interprets a
construction in a different way from the speaker, ‘re’-analysis has not occurred, only
‘different’ analysis; strictly speaking, one cannot ‘re’-analyze a structure one does not
‘have’. This is why we prefer to follow Andersen (2001) and use the term ‘neoana-
lysis’. Another problem with reanalysis is that it is not manifested except when new
distributions are modeled on the new covert analysis (Harris and Campbell 1995,
Hopper and Traugott 2003, Fischer 2007). That is, we cannot know that a lot of was
neoanalyzed without evidence of examples such as (18), where N2 cannot literally be
divided into concrete parts, or (20), where agreement is with N2, not NP1.
In the literature on grammaticalization there has been considerable discussion of
whether grammaticalization is reanalysis as proposed in e.g. Roberts (1993). Heine
and Reh (1984), Haspelmath (1998) and many others argue it cannot be. Most of the
argument is based on the idea that reanalysis involves large-scale changes (see
Lightfoot 1999: 87–91 on ‘catastrophic’ change) and is not relevant to the discussion
of constructionalization in this chapter. The reader is referred to later chapters,
especially chapter 2.6, where there is some consideration of related issues concerning
gradualness (understood as micro-change in linguistic properties). Suffice it here to
say that we regard neoanalysis as a micro-step in a constructional change. Micro-step
changes, whether of form or of meaning, can be particularly well captured in models
of construction grammar that use features (e.g. Head Driven Phrase Structure
Grammar (HPSG) models as exemplified in Fried and Östman 2004a, or SBCG
25
How non-manifest it can be is demonstrated by Francis and Yuasa’s (2008) view mentioned in ft. 20
that only a semantic change has occurred.
The Framework 37
models as exemplified by Sag 2012). To repeat, the development of the quantifier a lot
of/lots of involves a micro-step neoanalysis from a pragmatic feature capturing the
quantity implicature from the meaning ‘part’ to the semantic feature ‘large quantity’
that characterizes the quantifier meaning. For speakers using this analysis, construc-
tional semantic changes led to a binominal partitive and binominal quantifier, both
with lot in NP1 position. This is what Eckardt (2006) would call ‘semantic reanalysis’
(see also Nørgård-Sørensen, Heltoft, and Schøsler 2011). When this quantifier mean-
ing became conventionalized a further micro-step neoanalysis led to a semantic head
shift such as is illustrated by (18) where a partitive interpretation is implausible; this
was a constructional change. Evidence from lack of agreement between a lot of and
the following verb (20) suggests a further constructional neoanalysis involving
syntactic head-shift. The result was a constructionalization.
1.6.4.2 Analogization (‘analogy’) At the time when Meillet wrote about grammati-
calization the concept of analogy was rather different from that of the present day. It
was largely restricted to specific exemplar-based pattern matching, and was not
conceptualized as generalized extension of rules (Kiparsky 1968) or constraints
(Kiparsky 2012). The role of analogy in grammaticalization has long been recognized.
However, as frameworks for accounting for grammaticalization were being worked
out in the latter part of the twentieth century, analogy was felt to be too uncon-
strained to be useful in a restrictive hypothesis about change (see e.g. Givón 1991). It
has been only reluctantly accepted in some work on grammaticalization. For
example, in keeping with Haspelmath (1998), Lehmann (2004) explicitly distin-
guishes what he called ‘pure grammaticalization without analogy’ from grammati-
calization with analogy. Examples of ‘pure grammaticalization’ that he gives include
i) numeral ‘one’ > indefinite article, and ii) demonstrative > definite article in
Germanic and Romance languages, iii) spatial preposition > marker of the passive
agent in Ancient Greek, and iv) personal pronouns > preverbal cross-reference
markers in colloquial varieties of Romance (Lehmann 2004: 161). However, in the
case of Lat. cantare habeo, which is attested in various orders, most of them with
habe- preceding the infinitive, e.g. habeo cantare, it is assumed that the word order
with habe- following the infinitive must have been fixed prior to the development of
the inflectional future. Lehmann acknowledges that it is likely that this fixing was
due to analogy with the already extant inflectional future, e.g. cantabo ‘I will sing’. He
goes on to say that ‘analogically-oriented grammaticalization is still a kind of
grammaticalization’, but concludes ‘the proprium (‘specific nature’T&T) of gramma-
ticalization comes out only in pure grammaticalization’ (2004: 162).
The role of analogy in grammaticalization is reassessed in Fischer’s (2007) book
advocating the importance of analogy in change. Fischer draws on Anttila’s (2003)
‘analogical grid’ and argues that it operates on both paradigmatic (iconic) and
syntagmatic (indexical) dimensions. She focuses on on-line processing rather than
structural properties of language use, and argues that analogy, not reanalysis, is the
prime mechanism in grammaticalization (see also De Smet 2009). In the gramma-
ticalization literature attention has shifted from the trajectories of individual expres-
sions such as cantare habeo > chanterai, and from abstract clines such as main verb >
auxiliary > clitic > inflection to ways in which grammaticalizing items may become
aligned within a category or construction (the typological work of Heine and his
colleagues has been especially important here). This is consistent with the attention
paid to sets and networks in construction grammar. As will be elaborated on in
chapter 3, we take the position that it is important to distinguish the process of
analogical thinking from the mechanism of analogy, better called ‘analogization’ to
avoid the ambiguity between thinking (a motivation) and change based on pattern
match (a mechanism) (see further Traugott and Trousdale 2010a). Analogical think-
ing matches aspects of meaning and form; it enables, but may or may not result in
change. By contrast, analogization is a mechanism or process of change bringing
about matches of meaning and form that did not exist before. Likewise it is important
to distinguish the process of parsing, which may enable (or ‘motivate’) different
analyses from those current before, from the mechanism of neoanalysis, which
results in new structures. The distinctions are summarized in Table 1.2:
TABLE 1.2. Motivation vs. mechanism

Change-enabling process Mechanism
Analogical thinking Analogization

Parsing Neoanalysis
Most discussion of analogization is exemplar-based, e.g. ‘we need to conceive of

grammar as based on constructions, and as having an exemplar representation in
which specific instances of use affect representation’ (Bybee 2006: 714; see also Bybee
and McClelland 2005). A constructional perspective on change strongly supports the
idea that pattern matching is an important factor in change, because construction
grammar highlights membership of sets. As we have seen, in discussing ditransitives,
Goldberg is not interested in constructions that involve intentional transfer alone
(e.g. give, pass, hand, feed), but also in the many other types of patterns that have
similar form-meaning pairings, such as creation and intended transfer (e.g. bake,
build, pour (a drink)), and communication (e.g. tell, ask, quote), and the fine-grained
differences among them. From a historical perspective it is natural to ask how such
sets came into being or were lost. Analogical thinking and analogization are essential
for answering this question. We revisit the issue in chapter 2.3 in connection with the
role of networks in innovation and change.
The Framework 39
1.6.5 Work on diachronic construction grammar

What we here call ‘diachronic construction grammar’ (to borrow Noël’s 2007 term) is
work that addresses historical change from the perspective of one of the models of
construction grammar, with focus on the fact that ‘construction’ must be understood
as a form-meaning pairing. As Noël points out, in construction grammar terms,
although much of the work conducted has addressed grammatical change, construc-
tion grammar embraces lexical change as well. To date construction grammar has
largely been applied to historical linguistics or the latter has been applied to the
former, and new insights have therefore arisen. But no overarching view of construc-
tional change has been proposed in these works, nor has an account been given of
the special kind of change of the sort we call constructionalization. We attempt to
fill this gap.
Diachronic construction grammar is a field that has experienced a dramatic
explosion of interest since the mid 1990s and only a few trends and references can
be mentioned here. Israel (1996) is an early example of research which applied
principles of Goldbergian Cognitive Construction Grammar to morphosyntactic
change, illustrating some of the stages through which the English way-construction
developed. Bergs and Diewald (2008) is the first edited volume devoted to developing
a theoretical framework for combining construction grammar and morphosyntactic
change. Historical work consistent with Goldberg’s (2006) views of construction
grammar is to be found in papers in Bergs and Diewald (2008, 2009b), and Colleman
and De Clerck (2011) consider specialization in the semantic evolution of the English
ditransitive construction in the recent history of English. A Radical Construction
Grammar approach to the development of English periphrastic causatives is
developed in Hollmann (2003). A large number of works seek to combine construc-
tion grammar with grammaticalization. Representatives of this trend include Noël
(2007) and many papers in Bergs and Diewald (2008, 2009). Brems (2011) brings
together diachronic grammaticalization and construction grammar in her study of
the development of binominal measure expressions. So does Patten (2012) in her
account of the development of English clefts. Particularly important in this area is the
work of Fried (e.g. Fried 2008, 2010, 2013). She has been concerned with the role of
context in constructional change, an issue to which we return in chapter 5. She adopts
a Fillmorean HPSG notation to model the relationship between the internal proper-
ties of the constituent parts of a construction and the external properties of the
construction itself, as grammaticalization proceeds micro-step by micro-step. As is
the case in the present work, Fried’s research on constructional change makes a
distinction between constructions as ‘pieces of grammar’ (Kay and Fillmore 1999: 2)
and constructs, the utterances which constitute the locus of innovation. Aspects of
the approach to constructionalization developed here appear in Traugott (2007,
2008a, b), Trousdale (2008a, b, c, 2010) and Verveckken (2012).
While much of the work on diachronic construction grammar has been on

changes in English (e.g. Israel 1996, Hollmann 2003, Traugott 2007, 2008a, Patten
2010, 2012, Colleman and De Clerck 2011, Gisborne 2011) some research in diachronic
Construction Grammar has been carried out on other languages, such as Old Church
Slavonic (Fried 2008, 2010), and languages of east and mainland south-east Asia
(Bisang 2009, 2010, Horie 2011, Zhan 2012). Verveckken (2012) investigates the
development of Spanish binominal quantifiers from a constructionalization perspec-
tive, and Verroens (2011) discusses the grammaticalization of French se mettre à, in
part from this point of view. Nørgård-Sørensen, Heltoft, and Schøsler (2011) focus on
changes in Danish, French, and Russian. In this work, as in that of Croft and
Goldberg, constructions are conceptualized as usage-based language-specific form-
meaning pairings within a non-modular theory of grammar. Nørgård-Sørensen,
Heltoft, and Schøsler’s framework, which draws extensively on work by Andersen
(e.g. 2001, 2008), is distinct in the focus on ways in which constructions participate in
paradigms, or syntagmatic and semantic sets, whether morphological (for example,
case), or syntactic (for example, word order).
Other kinds of historical constructional work include comparative studies on the
development of particular constructions in different languages, e.g. Noël and Colle-
man (2010) on accusative and infinitive (ACI) and evidential nominative and infini-
tive (NCI) verbs in both English and Dutch. Historical comparative reconstruction
has also been approached from a construction grammar perspective (see for instance
Gildea 1997, 2000 on the Cariban languages of Amazonia, and Barðdal 2013, Barðdal
and Eythorsson 2012 on Icelandic). Since in constructional approaches to language,
units from the morpheme to the clause are treated alike as form-meaning pairings, it
is argued that the comparative approach to lexical and morphological items may be
extended to syntax: cognates in the constructicon range from lexical items to
argument structure constructions. As Barðdal and Eythorsson (2003) and Joseph
and Janda (2003a), among others, have noted, syntactic structures tend to be more
stable over time than is the case for phonological segments or morphemes. Yet
Barðdal (2013) observes that the notion of a cognate is as applicable to argument
structure constructions as it is to morphemes—patterns associated with case frames
of impersonal predicates also lend themselves to syntactic reconstruction. Further-
more, the conventional/arbitrary nature of form-meaning pairings at the clausal level
in the constructional framework supports the claim that syntactic reconstruction is as
feasible as morphological reconstruction.
1.7 Evidence
Because historical linguistics is an empirical discipline it depends on evidence. But as
discussed in Fischer (2004) and Fitzmaurice and Smith (2012), the notion of evidence
is not without problems. Data for the study of variation and change is largely indirect
The Framework 41
since it is the representation of language in written documents. This can provide only
‘hints as to what causes variation and change, hints about the mechanism that play a
role in change; hints about what speakers do’ (Fischer 2004: 730–731). Furthermore,
the textual record that survives from the earlier periods in many cases survives only
because of accident, or may be hard to interpret. Most work is nowadays based on
data bases such as electronic corpora and dictionaries, all of which use edited
manuscripts, which may be more or less faithful to their originals (Horobin 2012).
For example, much punctuation prior to the eighteenth century has been added by
editors, and therefore syntactic structure may have been prejudged (see Parkes 1991
on punctuation practices prior to the eighteenth century).
Since this is a book about historical change, most of the data is available only in
written form. To maintain consistency, contemporary data that we use is also written.
As pointed out by Kohnen and Mair (2012: 275) ‘[h]istorians of English have tended
to regret that they had to reconstruct the authentic history of the vernacular from the
“second-best” source of data, that is, literature and other written records rather than
the lost and supposedly “real” spoken language’. For example, Labov (1994: 11)
famously said that historical linguists essentially have to ‘make the best of bad
data’. However this assessment has been tempered by a variety of observations.
One is that prior to wide-spread literacy, most texts were written to be read aloud;
therefore audience design has been a feature of writing as well as of speech for well
over a thousand years in the history of English. Another is that there is a wealth of
written data that represents or is close to spoken data, much of it now accessible
through electronic data bases. Another is that not all change occurs in speech.
Written data close to speech includes diaries, letters, drama, trials in England and
the US prior to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Culpeper and Kytö
2010). Prior to the eighteenth century, trials are particularly valuable as data since
there were no defense lawyers, ‘prosecutors’ were typically individuals (a mother
whose child was abducted or a silversmith whose spoon was stolen) who brought
claims against defendants (see e.g. Archer 2006, 2007). Transcriptions such as those
that make up the Proceedings of Old Bailey 1764–1834 have been shown to reflect
speech factors like reduction of not to n’t (Huber 2007). More recently new tech-
nologies such as television, computers, and cell phones have led to the blurring of
distinctions between writing and speech.
While it seems reasonable to suppose that most change arises in speech because
literacy is learned, and far from universal, nevertheless some changes appear to be
based in writing. For example, Biber has studied the development of noun sequences
such as communication protocol (see Biber 2003, Biber and Gray 2012) especially in
newspapers, and has associated it with a growing tendency from the nineteenth
century on toward information efficiency and economy. Although typically associ-
ated with writing, this phenomenon is also attested in spoken language (e.g. blood
sports, career woman), and in this case written registers may have influenced speech
(Leech, Hundt, Mair, and Smith 2009: 219, ft. 22). Furthermore, even though writing
is decontextualized one should not forget that it is interactional, designed not only to
state, but to persuade, amuse, or otherwise engage the reader. Therefore written texts
are not necessarily ‘bad data’.
As a researcher, one needs to be aware that the written record that comes down to
us is on a gradient from formal proclamation to informal notation. The amount of
informal writing increased with the advent of printing on paper in the late fifteenth
century in Europe. Being relatively cheap and easily replicable, this medium encour-
aged the representation and preservation of personal communication, but speech
styles can be found in late medieval plays such as the York Mystery Plays, which were
recorded in manuscript form before printing (Beadle 2009). In these God speaks in
high style, but villains like Herod and Satan or comic characters like Noah’s wife
speak in low style, with insults, curses, interjections, and exclamations. Over time
there has, in English, been a consistent tendency toward ‘colloquialization’, the
tendency for written norms to be adapted to speech, and this may be in competition
with the tendency toward economy mentioned above (Leech, Hundt, Mair, and
Smith 2009: 252). Therefore, where possible, it is important to distinguish structural
change in language from change in literacy practices, which are based in cultural
ideologies. It is also important to be aware of distinctions among text-types and their
cultural significance.
In this book we use a broad spectrum of texts, with attention to structural changes
rather than to issues of speech versus writing, colloquial or formal register, except
where these appear to be particularly relevant. We draw on a variety of electronic
corpora, most especially the The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (Extended
Version) (CLMETEV, abbreviated as CL in quotations; nearly fifteen million words
of largely literary texts from 1710–1920), The Corpus of Historical American English
(COHA, a four hundred million corpus of American English from 1810–2009), and
Proceedings of the Old Bailey 1674–1913 (OBP). Of the latter, entries for the period
1674–1843 are the most valuable for linguistic work as they are the least affected by
legal conventions (Huber 2007); they approximate fifty-two million words. Contem-
porary examples are drawn mainly from The Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA, a four hundred and fifty million word corpus of American English
from 1990–2012). Earlier data is derived mainly from older corpora such as The
Helsinki Corpus (HC, approximately one million five hundred thousand words from
750–1710), and Early English Books Online (LION: EEBO, nearly nine hundred
million words in 2008), and The Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC). Although
digital corpora are designed to be representative of certain varieties of a language,
and provide rich and deep resources, nevertheless they are selective. As pointed
out in Rissanen (2012: 213), even the best corpora therefore ‘represent only a slice of
linguistic reality’.
The Framework 43
Other data bases that have been drawn on but are not representative corpora
include Google, Google Books, and two major historical dictionaries of English, the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and The Middle English Dictionary (MED).
Although widely used as a starting point for research, the OED does not provide
enough context for detailed research on micro-changes and their contexts (see e.g.
Hoffmann 2004 and Allan 2012 on problems associated with using the OED as a
corpus including use as a resource for dating changes; Mair 2004 also discusses the
problems, but concludes that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages if clause-
level grammatical phenomena such as use of BE going to, begin/start to V/V-ing are
under discussion). Google provides inadequate documentation (of contributors,
textual sources, etc.), and the authenticity of the examples is often in question.
However, on the positive side, it is an excellent source for neologisms, it gives
evidence for a wider spectrum of language varieties than traditional corpora, and is
a multilingual communicative domain and therefore can be an outstanding resource
for study of ongoing change (Mair 2012).
Wherever possible dates are provided with examples. However, especially in the
earlier periods, dating is often approximate at best. When we refer to periods, the
dating is somewhat arbitrary. Periodization of English is debated as it is based on a
variety of factors, linguistic, political (e.g. the Norman Conquest), and technological
(e.g. printing). Here we use the following traditional approximate dates: Old English
650–1100; Middle English 1100–1500; Modern English 1500–1970, divided into Early
Modern English (1500–1700) and Late Modern English (1700–1970); Present Day
English 1970–present.
1.8 Summary and outline of the book

This chapter has presented an introduction to a large number of topics that will be
discussed more fully in later chapters. In a nutshell, evolving approaches over the last
hundred years to the observation that variation is the source and outcome of change
have brought us back to the sign, but very differently construed from Saussure’s sign.
Finding variation too idiosyncratic and rejecting then current failures to distinguish
between change and variation, Saussure privileged langue over parole and sought
system in the synchronic sign, understood as a form-meaning pairing at the level
of the morpheme or word. In the mid-twentieth century Chomsky (1957 on) focused
on language as a cognitive system, and privileged competence over performance,
I-language over E-language. He sought system in UG and in syntax. In the seventies
Labov demonstrated that systematicity could be found in variation, especially phono-
logical variation, and variation over time (see Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968).
By the early eighties Lehmann (1995) was demonstrating systematicity in gramma-
ticalization, understood as morphosyntactic change (see also Bybee 1985). The
present interest in construction grammar, at least of the kind represented by the
work of Goldberg, Croft, and Langacker, privileges use and cognitive abilities;
language is seen as a system of signs, understood as form-meaning pairings from
morpheme to complex clause.
The usage-based approach to construction grammar sees language as both struc-
tured and variable. As Bybee (2010: 1) says, language is ‘a phenomenon that exhibits
apparent structure and regularity of patterning while at the same time showing
considerable variation at all levels’. This is a position we assume throughout. Our
focus on constructionalization seeks to pinpoint the crucial factors that lead up to and
follow the development of formnew-meaningnew pairings, that is, of new constructions.
In this chapter we have outlined some of the key features of a constructional approach
to language and of our approach to sign change within a constructional framework.
The main ideas that we will return to throughout this book are:
(a) Constructions are linked in a network, with more schematic constructions
sanctioning those lower in the taxonomy. The more schematic the construc-
tional type, the greater the generalizations that can be made. Conversely,
idiosyncrasies are more typical at lower levels in the taxonomy.
(b) Changes are not autonomous but are related to constructions in different
ways. Changes in meaning or form alone that affect individual constructions
are constructional changes.
(c) Changes that result in formnew-meaningnew pairings after a series of small-step
constructional changes are constructionalizations. They are gradual, and the
main focus of this book. (There are some cases of instantaneous lexical micro-
constructionalizations, discussed in chapter 4.8).
(d) Constructions are on a gradient from lexical/contentful to grammatical/
procedural.
Chapter 2 lays out some fundamental principles of the usage-based model of gram-
mar that we will be using. In particular we take up point (a) above and suggest ways
in which a network approach to language can inform understanding of change. In
chapter 3 we provide a detailed account of grammatical constructionalization and
ways in which it incorporates and goes beyond earlier work on grammaticalization.
In chapter 4 constructional changes that are primarily lexical are discussed, including
the development of word-formation patterns. We also give an account of how a
constructional view of lexical change can incorporate and go beyond prior work on
lexicalization. One of the major factors in change, and especially in understanding of
constructionalization, is context. How to think about context in constructional terms
is the topic of chapter 5. Chapter 6 serves as a summary of key points and suggests
future directions for research.
2
A Usage-Based Approach
to Sign Change
2.1 Introduction
In this chapter we elaborate on the usage-based model and on the idea that language is
a network of relations among constructions. In particular, we explore the importance
of networks in accounting for the fact that changes are interconnected, and seek to
show how a network grows and contracts, assuming a usage-based model of change.
Since our focus is on change, we will not be able to address except indirectly several
important questions that have to do with the theory of networks in general. A cogent set
of questions was posed in Rice (1996) with respect to some earlier work using semantic
networks, especially Lakoff ’s (1987) idea of radial categories. Some of Rice’s questions
remain pertinent today since form and meaning may be mismatched and have links in
many different directions. Among the questions raised (Rice 1996: 142–145) are:
(a) Given that a network contributes a multidimensional territory or field, how far
does the territory extend?
(b) Can elements move closer and farther apart?
(c) How do new nodes and links develop?
Rice (2003) later sought to answer (c) with respect to language acquisition, as did
Goldberg in her 2006 book. In this chapter we attempt to address all three questions,
but especially (c), with respect to change of form as well as meaning. We return
specifically to Rice’s questions, and provide a summary of our answers to them, in
section 2.8.
Many of the issues are common topics in psycholinguistic research and in work in
cognitive psychology. While we recognize the importance of links between syn-
chronic analyses of language and psycholinguistics (Tomasello 2003; Bencini 2013),
neurolinguistics (Pulvermüller, Cappelle, and Shtyrov 2013) and cognitive psych-
ology (see discussion in Sinha 2007), we question to what extent they can be more
than suggestive of change understood as conventionalization of innovations in times
past. Therefore we mention only a small subset of relevant psycholinguistic literature,
and only in passing.
By way of preview of this chapter, we use networks as a way of talking about

individual knowledge (i.e. the representation of an idiolect, the reflection of an
individual mind), community knowledge (i.e. the representation of the structure
of English at a given point in time), and language change (i.e. how the structure of
English varies over time), while recognizing that these different facets of network
structure are not applicable in each case. Crucially, for our perspective, innovations
are features of individual knowledge, and as such are manifest in the networks of
individuals, while changes must be shared across individual networks in a popula-
tion. We return to this issue at various points in the following subsections. Changes
in a ‘community’ network develop through cross-population sharing of tiny innova-
tive steps that occur in individual instances of speaker-hearer interaction, largely via
a processes of neoanalysis, including analogization (see Raumolin-Brunberg and
Nurmi 2011 for a summary of work on the role of the individual in language change).
The kinds of incremental developments we describe for the rise of constructions is
comparable in many ways to the discussion of sound change proposed by Labov
(2007) and to the domain-general processes that Bybee (2010: 221) proposes ‘operate
through repetition on a massive scale, within individuals and certainly within
communities’. As discussed in chapter 1, innovations may be one-offs or idiosyncrasies
of a particular speaker or hearer, which are manifest in individual networks. These are
not ‘changes’ at a population level. However, if modifications to meaning or form are
replicated in attested data we may conclude that the innovations in question have been
adopted by other speakers in a social network and have ‘played out’ across usage in that
social network, in other words that the innovations in individual minds have led to
conventionalized ‘changes’ in more than one individual mental network. As we will
show, such constructional changes involve new links among features of a network
node, but no new node in the network (see further section 2.3.1).
We begin with a discussion of the usage-based framework of construction gram-
mar adopted in this book (2.2). In section 2.3 we elaborate on the concept of networks
in a usage-based model. Types of links in the network are the topic of 2.4. Through-
out the chapter we suggest ways in which each topic can inform historical work, but
2.5 zeroes in on some of the ways in which networks may grow, be reorganized, and
contract. In 2.6 we discuss gradualness and gradience briefly, and in 2.7 we revisit the
development of the way-construction to exemplify the issues in relative detail. 2.8
provides a summary and raises some questions that arise out of thinking about
change from the perspective of usage and networks.
2.2 Usage-based models

A powerful usage-base model of language was developed at the beginning of the
twentieth century by Paul (see especially 1920), but was overshadowed in the second
A Usage-Based Approach to Sign Change 47
half of the century by the focus of generative grammar on abstract competence.

A variety of factors has led to renewed but in many cases significantly different
interest in usage, depending on the researcher’s domain of work. These domains
include cognitive linguistics (e.g. Bybee 1985, 2010; Langacker 1987, 2008), discourse
and communication (e.g. Hopper 1987; Givón 1979, 1995), processing (e.g. Hawkins
2004), acquisition (e.g. Tomasello 2003), and change (e.g. Bybee 2010, De Smet
2012).1 The advent toward the end of the twentieth century of high quality recording
technologies, digital resources, and data mining techniques has aided in the compil-
ation and analysis of resources. The general assumption is that language use is a
complex and dynamic activity.
Bybee argues that use and knowledge together are key to understanding language
both synchronically and diachronically. In particular, she argues that what speakers
do affects mental representations: ‘[c]entral to the usage-based position is the
hypothesis that instances of use impact the cognitive representation of language’
(Bybee 2010: 14). This position reaffirms her earlier proposal that grammar should be
thought of as ‘the cognitive organization of language experience’ (Bybee 2006: 730).
Taylor defines the usage-based approach to language structure as one in which
‘linguistic knowledge is acquired “bottom-up”, on the basis of encounters with the
language, from which schematic representations are abstracted’ (Taylor 2002: 592).
Representations are abstractions and types, not identical with, but based on, input
and token constructs. We take the position that in order to understand change, it is
necessary to recognize both knowledge and use; knowledge is not fixed and immut-
able, but nevertheless the ground out of which innovation emerges. Speakers use
existing resources to create novel expressions (see also Boas 2008).
In a usage-based model small-step micro-changes are identified and new struc-
tures are said to ‘emerge’. Since the term is widely debated (see Auer and Pfänder
2011a, 2011b for recent discussion), we pause here to comment on use of this term and
to clarify what we mean by it. Hopper (2011) usefully distinguishes the coming into
existence, ‘emerging’, ‘epigenesis’, or ‘development of a form out of it surroundings’
(p. 27) from what he has called ‘emergence’ (see Hopper 1987, 2008 and elsewhere).
The concept of emerging phenomena presupposes some structure or norm out of
which new uses arise. In Hopper’s concept of ‘emergent’ phenomena, however, ‘a
grammatical structure is always temporary and ephemeral’ (Hopper 2011: 26). In his
view, ‘emergent grammar’ is provisional, epiphenomenal to conversation and ‘con-
sists not of sentences generated by rules, but of linear on-line assembly of familiar
fragments . . . categories don’t exist in advance of the communicative setting’ (p. 28).
By contrast, in the same volume, Auer and Pfänder (2011a: 18) argue that to account
for change in a usage-based model it is necessary to think of both ‘categorized
1
An overview of the implications of a usage-based approach for these domains of research is provided
in Diessel’s (2011) review of Bybee (2010). Diessel outlines ‘ten theses on the usage-based approach’.
linguistic knowledge’ and use leading to innovation because otherwise improvisation

would be impossible: ‘[f]or improvisation to work, speakers and hearers must have a
shared stock of expectations of what is to come in the syntactic project’ (p. 15). Given
our view that both (flexible) knowledge and use must be accounted for, when we use
the terms ‘emerge’ and ‘emerging‘ we intend coming into being on the basis of use of
extant structures and norms, not ‘emergence’ in Hopper’s sense.
In the next subsections we briefly mention two important issues for usage-based
models: a) storage and entrenchment as a unit and b) the extent to which a schema,
once formed, sanctions new constructs and constructions.
2.2.1 Storage as a unit

Croft and Cruse (2004: 292) observe that the usage-based model rests on the principle
that ‘properties of the use of utterances in communication also determine the
representation of grammatical units in a speaker’s mind’. Since constructions are
entrenched, stored units, how storage comes about is important for understanding
constructionalization. Language is acquired through exposure to actual usage events.
Generalizations and commonalities are established over specific examples of lan-
guage in use. At the same time, how frequently a word is encountered by a speaker
determines the extent to which it is entrenched (or stored as a unit) even though it
may be decomposable into individual parts. It was an assumption of much work in
linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century that if there is a generalization
(‘rule’) then individual subtypes (‘lists’) should not be included in the linguist’s
grammar of a language. Langacker (1987: 29) rejected this approach, assuming that
such a grammar should represent language-user’s knowledge of language. Calling the
approach the ‘rule/list fallacy’, he pointed out that mastery of a noun pluralization
rule like N + s should not be mutually exclusive with mastery of a particular plural
noun like beads or eyes; they are both facets of a speaker’s knowledge. Frequent
encounters with and use of the plural form may mean that it is entrenched as a unit,
an atomic rather than complex construction.
One of the best-known examples of storage of complex morphological constructions
as units comes from the behaviour of frequently occurring irregular morphological
forms such as were, had and knew (Bybee and Slobin 1982, Bybee 2010). These forms
have been shown to be resistant to change, especially regularization. By contrast, less
frequently occurring irregular morphological forms are subject to regularization, in
that they become neoanalyzed and realigned as members of the more productive
[[Vi]ed] $ [SEMi+past]] schema. This may even occur within a set of verbs which
have phonologically similar stem-endings: for instance, the past tense of frequently
occurring verbs like bend and send continues to be irregular (bent and sent, respectively),
while the past tense of the lower frequency blend has regularized from blent to blended.
Evidence for the importance of token frequency in determining unit status has
been provided by, for example, Losiewicz (1992) who showed that the duration of [d]
when functioning as a past tense allomorph is longer than the duration of mono-
morphemic final [d] (as in the difference between the final consonant of complex
frayed compared to the final consonant of atomic afraid); see also Walsh and Parker
(1983) on a similar pattern for [s] in laps vs. lapse. This comparison was then
extended to two subsets of verbs which take the regular past tense inflection; one
set which was of higher frequency (e.g. played, needed) and another of lower
frequency (e.g. frayed, kneaded). In this case, [d] in the former set of words was
shorter than the latter. Taken together, these two experiments provide evidence that
high frequency polymorphemic words pattern like monomorphemes, and may
therefore be stored in a similar way.
Historically, it appears that storage of t/d/ed tense markers has for the most part
been stable in English, hence the continued compositionality for many speakers of
played as well as frayed, but in a few cases, notably of modals, which are used with
higher frequency than main verbs, past tenses have become non-compositional at
least in some uses. For example, might meaning ‘low probability’ is frozen as a unit
and remains unchanged in reported speech, as in (1). However, when used as the
reported speech form of may, might is a compositional past tense form, as in (2):
(1) I might go later. She said she might go later.
(2) I may go later. She said she might go later.
On the other hand, must and ought (to) are completely fixed past tense forms
(originally OE most-, past tense of mot- ‘be able to’, and aht-, past tense of ag-
‘have, owe’), which suggests that might meaning ‘low probability’, must and ought
became stored as atomic micro-constructions.
2.2.2 Sanction
In the synchronic usage-based literature an expression is said to be more or less
‘sanctioned’ by a more general type or schema (Langacker 1987). Neoanalysis and
realignment to a more productive extant schema such as was mentioned above for
blended, will be referred to as ‘becoming sanctioned’ by a different schema. For
example, according to the textual record, prior to the beginning of the nineteenth
century, although sporadic examples of a lot of are found in contexts that suggest it
might have been intended or understood as a quantifier as well as a partitive (see
1.5.1), it was probably not conventionalized as a quantifier until the late eighteenth
century, when examples in this use begin to proliferate. When it came to be used as a
quantifier it came to be sanctioned by the extant quantifier schema. This already had
a binominal member, a deal of, as well as quantifiers like much, many, few, a little.
The schema grew as a result of sanctioning the new micro-constructions a lot of, lots
of, and appears to have ‘motivated’ or provided the template for, several other new
uses of partitives and measure expressions as quantifiers (Brems 2011).
In the Cognitive Grammar literature (e.g. Langacker 1987, 1991) an important

distinction is made between full and partial sanction (roughly equivalent to instanti-
ation and extension). These are considered to be two different kinds of categoriza-
tion. Full sanction/instantiation occurs when a construct is fully consistent with the
micro-construction of which it is an instance; partial sanction/extension occurs
‘when the target of categorization is only partly compatible with the sanctioning
schema’ (Broccias 2013: 195). We will suggest later in this chapter and throughout the
book that, in the life cycle of a construction, an enabling factor for constructionaliza-
tion of a micro-construction is when the partial sanction results from mismatch.
A new micro-construction node in the network may then be created that eventually
allows such constructs to be fully sanctioned. Partial sanction may also occur when a
schema or some of its members obsolesce and appear to have become so marginal to
an existing micro-construction that they become highly idiosyncratic.
2.3 Networks in a usage-based model

The network metaphor has been developed in work conducted on a number of
cognitive linguistic theories including the Berkeley Framenet Project (Fillmore and
Baker 2001, 2010). Networks play a significant role in models of grammar developed
by Goldberg (e.g. 1995, 2006), Croft (e.g. 2001), and Langacker (e.g. 2008), and most
especially in Hudson’s (non-constructional) Word Grammar (e.g. 2007a, b), and
Lamb’s stratificational grammar (1998). The idea that language is a network fits well
with claims from cognitive linguistics that other aspects of cognition such as vision
and musical abilities are also structured as a network (e.g. Bharucha 1987, Rebuschat,
Rohrmeier, Hawkins, and Cross 2012). It is consistent with Bybee’s (2010) view that
language patterning is part of our domain-general capacity to categorize, establish
relations, and to operate on both local and global levels. It is also consistent with
Goldberg’s statement that ‘knowledge of language is knowledge’ (Goldberg 1995: 5),
in other words, knowledge of language is part of a larger knowledge-system that
includes vision, music, and other cognitive capacities.
The network model is a central one in cognitive linguistics because of the key claim
that the organization of language is not intrinsically different from the organization
of other aspects of cognition. Hudson (1984: 1) proposed a Network Postulate:
‘Language is a conceptual network’. Langacker (2008) has described the architecture
of his model of cognitive grammar as a constructional network:
[W]e can describe a language as a structured inventory of conventional linguistic units. This
structure—the organization of units into networks and assemblies—is intimately related to
language use, both shaping it and being shaped by it. (Langacker 2008: 222, emphasis original)
Langacker represents cognitive networks as in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1 Langacker’s (2008: 226) representation of a constructional network
This kind of two-dimensional representation does, however, not do full justice to a

network which is multi-dimensional (being conceptualized in terms of neuronal
networks). Some nodes in the network represent schemas, others subschemas, and
others micro-constructional types. For example, while there are links in the network
between partitive and quantifier schemas, there are also subnetworks associated with
these schemas (large vs. small quantifiers) and links between micro-constructions
that are members of the subschemas. Also not represented in Figure 2.1 is the fact that
because each node represents a construction of some level of abstractness, it general-
izes over the features of a construction. Therefore a node has form and meaning
content (albeit of varying degrees of complexity and specificity—some may be
underspecified) and links are possible in multiple different directions between the
semantics, pragmatics, discourse function, syntax, morphology, and phonology of
any node. Each node is linked in various ways to other nodes in the network, to be
discussed below in 2.4.
2.3.1 The relationship between networks, language processing,

and language learning
We adopt a view of the relationship between the structure of the network, language
processing and language learning broadly consistent with that of Langacker and
Goldberg but adapted for thinking about change. As indicated in the previous
chapter, changes start with tokens or constructs. In 1.4.2.1 we defined constructs as:
empirically attested tokens (e.g. attested I gave Sarah a book, She needed a lot of energy),
instances of use on a particular occasion, uttered by a particular speaker (or written by a
particular writer) with a particular communicative purpose.
We hypothesize that in processing a construct, the hearer attempts to match the input
with nodes in his or her network. Sometimes a full match may be made between what the
speaker intends and the hearer understands (see section 2.2.2 above on full sanction), but
sometimes this is not the case. The hearer may link all or some part of the utterance with
nodes different from those intended by the speaker. This may happen in cases of
ambiguity already sanctioned by the language system. For example, the PDE con-
structed sentence (3) is semantically and syntactically ambiguous. Speaker A may
mean (3a), while speaker B may interpret (3b) or even (3c). This does not involve
innovation since all three interpretations have been available for many centuries, i.e.
there are a number of schemas available, each of which will fully sanction the construct:
(3) I saw a man on the hill with a telescope.
a. Using a telescope I saw a man on the hill.
b. I saw a man on the hill and he was using a telescope.
c. I saw a man on the hill that had a telescope on it.
In some cases no direct link may in fact be available, and then the hearer will attempt
to make the best fit with an extant node or feature of a node, resulting in partial
sanction. This is an innovation by the hearer. Innovative constructs are symbolic in
that they involve a pairing of form and meaning but they lack conventionality (i.e. they
are not shared by members of a social network) and—even more critically for present
purposes—they are not units, because they are not (yet) substantially entrenched. They
do not become instances of change until they are repeatedly used and become
conventional signs. Initially persistence is in the memory of the individual, but in
instances of change, the shift from construct to construction is the product not just of
memory but of repeated use as increasing numbers of individuals use the same kind of
innovation over time.
As discussed in 2.5.1 below, at the initial stage, they may be on the ‘fringe’ of the
network by virtue of their new and potentially non-prototypical status, and indeed
may remain on the fringe. But over time, it is possible for marginal members of a
category to become more central, and vice versa.
By way of illustration, we can imagine that a speaker might have intended by an
utterance like (4) to refer to a collection of stones lying on top of one another
(implicating a large amount), but the hearer may have interpreted it as being about
a large quantity rather than a mound, in other words may have made a link to the
meaning associated with the quantifier construction:
(4) He led hym to a hep of stonys.
he led him to a heap of stones
(1349 Richard Rolle of Hampole [Brems 2011: 208; IMEPCS])
For a hearer who interpreted (4) as referring to a large quantity, such an interpret-
ation was an innovation at the level of the construct or token, specifically a neoana-
lysis at the meaning level resulting in mismatch between pragmatics and syntax.
Repeated assignments of the same or similar value to similar constructs by others
eventually led to the development of a conventionalized quantity reading and con-
structionalization (semantic and morphosyntactic neoanalyses, resulting in coexist-
ing micro-construction types, one measure, the other quantifier). What was initially
a tenuous link between part of a construct (its pragmatics) and a corresponding

part of a type in the existing constructional network was, no doubt unconsciously,
reconfigured over time by semantic and later syntactic head shift into a new conven-
tionalized node/micro-construction.
In the case of a hep of, we can imagine that the interpretation was sanctioned in
part not only by the semantics of the quantifier schema but also by the development
of quantifier meanings at approximately the same period (late ME) of several
partitive constructions including a deal of, a bit of, and a lot of. At this stage N1 in
each case was the syntactic head, but what seems to be a semantic quantifier reading
is occasionally attested, in which case the semantic head is N2. This mismatch
between form and meaning was resolved later. A heap/lot/bit of were all constructio-
nalized as quantifiers in the late eighteenth century (see chapter 1.5.1 for discussion of
a lot of and Brems 2012 on a heap of, a lot of, lots of ).
We do not mean to imply that in the scenario outlined above that the processes of
interpretation were identical in the case of each hearer. As Booij (2010: 93) points out,
it is an empirical question whether all language-users use the same modes of
abstraction in arriving at new structures. Since we are concerned with change, we
abstract over individual acts (innovations) to account for conventionalization and
sharing of new features. While individual minds are hypothesized to operate in
similar ways, the view of usage-based change adopted here assumes that in their
roles as speakers and hearers language users are not mirror images of each other
(contra e.g. Saussure 1959[1916] and Langacker 2007). In any usage event the speaker-
hearer dyad is asymmetric. Therefore speakers and hearers do not necessarily process
language in similar ways, though they may (see Queller 2003). The conventionaliza-
tion of a type reflects ‘a state of coordination between members of a community that
goes beyond several instances of linguistic interaction’ (Boye and Harder 2012: 8).
However, why speakers replicate, adopt, and conventionalize new constructs and
links between constructs is a matter of debate.2
Usage-based models of language learning unavoidably suggest a language network
that is rather baroque, involving massive redundancy and vastly rich detail, particu-
larly at the construct or token level. However, in among the messy details of language
use are regular generalizations that language users employ (unconsciously) to struc-
ture the network. In other words, there are some cognitive ‘benefits’ in both comput-
ing abstractions and in learning instances. Speakers and hearers use schemas that
bring together those more specific form-meaning pairings which the language user
perceives as being instantiations of a more general type. These schemas are useful to
language users because they enable the speaker/hearer to store information about a
set of constructs and constructions on one type node.
2
See Blythe and Croft (2012) for a summary of some of this debate.
2.3.2 Spreading activation

The network approach, as opposed to a modular, rule-based account, allows for the
(near-)simultaneous activation of closely related nodes in particular usage events, a
mechanism known as ‘spreading activation’ (Hudson 2010: 95). This phenomenon is
a feature of individual knowledge, and therefore may feature in the development of
innovations. However, spreading activation cannot be said to be a property of a
‘community-network’, or of networks in two different points in time (cf. section 2.1
above). It is a kind of linking process that has been tested in psycholinguistic
experiments (e.g. Harley 2008) involving dysfluencies such as slips of the tongue or
deliberate versions of them (spoonerisms as in (5a)) and malapropisms (5b). These
involve lateral, syntagmatic spreading activation:
(5) a. The Kinquering Congs their Titles Take. (hymn title attributed to Reverend
William Spooner)
b. Comparisons are odorous.
(1600 Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing III.v.18)
These kinds of activation are innovations, but neither spoonerisms nor malaprop-
isms appear to lead to any natural kind of change. However, the effects of asymmetric
priming, (e.g. from space to time, but not vice versa, Boroditsky 2000), have been
hypothesized to be plausible linguistic replicating mechanisms leading to directionality
in change, especially grammaticalization (Jäger and Rosenbach 2008). Priming, the
influence of an earlier meaning or form on an upcoming one, involves (pre)activation
of meaning, morphosyntax, or phonology. Goldberg (2006: 124) discusses evidence
from experiments for the priming of passives such as (6a) by intransitive locatives with
morphology shared by the passive. For example, (6b) primes (6a), but (6c) does not
since it does not contain was (see also Snider 2008 on priming effects in syntax):
(6) a. The construction worker was hit by the bulldozer.
b. The construction worker was digging by the bulldozer.
c. The construction worker might dig near the bulldozer.
Evidence for priming effects can be found in the speed at which a subject in a
psycholinguistic experiment can retrieve a particular linguistic form in relation to
other forms which precede (or prime) it (Ratcliff and McKoon 1981). In terms of
lexical items, for instance, we can set up an experiment to establish whether a word
like apple is primed by pear (or by fish, or honesty and so on) by seeing how quickly
the test word is retrieved by the experimental subject when it follows the potential
priming words. The hypothesis is that constructions which are closely related to each
other—in our model, constructions which are closely linked in the network—prime
each other more rapidly than words which are further apart in the network. The
more frequently a node or relation is activated, the more readily it may become
activated in the future (Hudson 2007a: 53; see also Langacker 1987, 2008, Schmid
2007, and Blumenthal-Dramé 2012 on entrenchment).
Spreading activation is central for the process of learning. If, as suggested by the
usage-based model of sign change, speakers are constantly ‘learning’ and recon-
figuring their language, then sign change must similarly involve the processing of a
mass of examples, and the abduction (Andersen 1973) of more general patterns across
those examples. At the same time, however, language users not only learn, but may
also ‘forget’. We may hypothesize that a lack of activation may lead to a lack of
entrenchment—the less frequently a node or relation is activated, the less readily it
becomes activated at a later time. If a particular node in the language network fails to
fire, this node becomes increasingly obsolete, and no longer functions to sanction
more specific instances. This accounts for obsolescence and eventual non-use of a
construction (see 2.5.1.3).
Spreading activation and priming are linked because priming provides a motiv-
ation for which nodes in a network should be ‘activated’ in particular usage events,
and which nodes should remain inactive (see further Collins and Loftus 1975).
Hudson suggests that the goal of processing is:
to find the best ‘path’ from the (known) form to the (unknown) meaning by selectively
activating intervening nodes which receive activation in both directions and damping down
the activation on all other nodes. (Hudson 2007a: 40)
Guidance to what that best path to the unknown meaning may be can come both
from priming (i.e. other words or constructions used by language users in the
discourse) and from implicatures and inferences made and accepted by participants
in that discourse. In other words, there are both cotextual and contextual factors that
help to shape the interpretation of given utterances, some of which relate to psycho-
linguistic issues of processing, and some of which relate more immediately to
discourse analytic strategies of interpreting meaning in context. Crucially, these
issues rely on speakers establishing links between form and meaning, and therefore
both formal and meaningful aspects of the surrounding discourse are likely to play a
role. An example is provided by the development of a deal of from a partitive to a
quantifier.
OE dæl meant ‘part’ (see German Teil ‘part’). Early uses with a nominal modifier
are clearly partitive:
(7) Ic gife þa twa dæl of Witlesmere.
I bequeath those two parts of Witlesmere
(a1121 Peterb.Chron. (LdMisc 636) [MED del n2, 1a])
A part implies a quantity, and dæl appears to have been the first binominal partitive
in English to be used with a clearly quantified meaning. This use is mostly restricted to
expressions modified by a quantifying adjective such as great and good ‘large’:
(8) Safroun & a gode dele Salt.

saffron and a large amount salt
(c1430 Two Cookery Books 15 [OED deal n1, 3])
Various ways are available for describing how users of the quantifier semantics of
deal illustrated in (8) might have come to make this innovation. One is to suggest that
there was a metonymic shift from the adjective to the noun deal. Another is that the
adjective reinforced the implicature of quantity from ‘part’ and eventually some
speakers came to associate quantity with deal. This could be said to be an example
of ‘context-absorption’ (Kuteva 2001: 151), the phenomenon of transfer of an invited
inference to a micro-construction allowing for later uses like (9) where there is no
adjective from which to derive quantification:
(9) Jesu Maria what a deal of brine
Hath washed thy sallow cheeks for Rosaline!
(1595–6 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet II.iii.69)
Yet another way of thinking about the development would be to refer to spreading
activation, assuming that the modifier great or good in (8) activated or primed
quantifier meaning, which spread to the noun.
The value of spreading activation for an account of change is that it sheds a
processual light on issues of gradience and gradualness (see 2.6 below) and the
observation that ‘representations can be simultaneously discrete and connected’
(De Smet 2010: 96). Synchronically the various features of constructs are activated,
be they pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic or phonological, and links with
features of other constructs are enabled. This ties in with the non-discreteness of
categories, the fuzziness of boundaries between them, and hence with gradience
(Denison 2006, Aarts 2007, Traugott and Trousdale 2010a). Over time the links with
other features may be strengthened leading to gradual step-by-step micro-changes.
2.3.3 Implications for ‘analogy’

In sum, linguistic innovations are interpretations of constructs that are ‘transient’
items of experience for both speakers and hearers, and are limited to a ‘fringe on the
edge of the permanent network’ (Hudson 2007a: 42). A speaker produces an utter-
ance which is equivocal, i.e. which can be parsed in more than one way. On-line
processes such as invited inferencing—itself interpretable as a kind of spreading
activation—arising from a speaker’s particular use of a construct, may enable the
hearer to analyze the utterance in a particular way, one which is novel to the hearer,
and one for which there is no extant construction that can sanction the construct.
The hearer then creates a provisional token node for the construct, and that node
may contain a great deal of information about the context of the utterance, the
relationship between speaker and hearer, and the fact that the utterance in question is
a sign, i.e. a pairing of form and meaning. While this token sign may have phono-
logical and phonetic detail, the morphological and syntactic detail may be less
specific or even absent. Similarly, the discourse and pragmatic detail of the sign
may be rich, but the hearer may not be able to access any associated conventional
semantics. The situation needs to be resolved for the utterance to be processed fully,
and so the hearer applies the best fit principle in order to find an extant construction
which provides the closest alignment of the discourse and pragmatic properties of the
observed construct and the stored constructional type or (sub)schema. When the
hearer attempts to match a construct with an existing part of the constructional
network and fails to do so because there is no existing micro-construction that
fully sanctions the construct, there is mismatch. The best the hearer can do is create a
link to align the meaning or the form of the construct with the meaning or form of other
extant (sub)schemas in the network. This is done based on the discourse/pragmatic
properties associated with both the (new) construct and the (existing) constructional
subschema. They involve mismatch between the intended and understood meaning.
Innovative constructs are symbolic in that they involve a pairing of form and
meaning but they lack conventionality because they are not shared by members of a
population. However, in some cases links appear to be so natural and are repeated so
frequently that they may come to the level of awareness or even be rhetorically
manipulated. A well-known case is after. A temporal preposition and conjunction
meaning ‘from the time that’, it is sometimes enriched to mean causality, in other
words, in some contexts the hearer is invited to make a link to the causal schema
through spreading activation. This is an example of the logical fallacy known as post hoc
ergo propter hoc ‘after this therefore because of this’. Although the causal interpretation
of after has been available from OE times, after has not been semanticized as a causal, i.e.
it has not undergone constructional change—the creation of a new token node in no
way determines that a change will follow. After shows that enriching implicatures, even
if replicated and long-lived, enable change, but do not cause it. By contrast to after, ME
sithenes, also meaning ‘from the time that, since’, has undergone change: it has both
temporal and causal polysemies (Traugott and König 1991). The causal link has become
substantially entrenched and a new unit, a causal polysemy, has developed.
Combining understanding of the processes that enable change with the examples
discussed suggests a way of further refining analogy. In chapter 1.6.4.2 we distin-
guished analogical thinking (an enabling factor or motivation) from analogization
(a mechanism of change). We also mentioned that much discussion of analogy in
usage-based models appeals to exemplars. Here we consider implications of the
usage-based approach for these factors. The ability to construe meaning by linking
to features across the network is in essence the ability to think analogically. Thinking
analogically is a motivation that may lead us to the best fit for a given temporary
construct. Most critically, as noted above, spreading activation is a mechanism
associated with the best-fit principle (see Hudson 2010: 95). Thinking analogically
may lead us to the best fit for a given temporary construct, so spreading activation as
a neural mechanism is likely to be linked to analogical thinking. Since it is also
associated with parsing, it has a role to play in neoanalysis. In other words, spreading
activation as a neural mechanism appears to be linked to both mechanisms of
language change identified in Table 1.2 of chapter 1. Such links are typically highly
transient. However, if they are adopted by a population of speakers, they may lead to
changes. In the case of a deal of, the initial step of ‘context-absorption’ as in (8) of the
measure semantics of the measure adjective into the noun deal involved analogical
thinking—parts have measure. However, since there was no exemplar there was no
analogization. During later ME, when we see evidence of this context-absorption, a
number of other binominal and measure partitives such as a lot/heap/bit of N also
begin to appear with what looks like potential quantifier use. Most of these are bare,
without measure adjectives. Presumably analogical thinking—in this case, linking
to best-fit semantics—was initially at work here as well. The coexistence of several
binominal expressions referring to part-whole and allowing pragmatic inferencing
to quantity may have enabled the conventionalized replication of uses in which
the form continues to be head-modifier ([a N1 [of N2]]) but the semantics
was mismatched with the modifier-head structure [Quant SEM], a constructional
change. Here we can postulate analogizations among the binominals, allowing
for the development of bare a deal of as in (9). Later in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries most of the binominals with mismatched form and meaning
underwent constructionalization to quantifiers, as exemplified in chapter 1.5.1 by a lot
of. At this stage the binominals served as exemplars in the sense of form-meaning
pairings for each other and for later developments, such as a shred/iota of (Brems 2011).
The logical consequence of the hypothesis outlined here is that no construction is
entirely new (except those that are borrowings and some coinings). There will always
be a link at a minimum to a feature of some node. This raises a question whether
analogy is primary as suggested by Fischer (2007) and De Smet (2009). As De Smet
(2012: 629) implies, ‘primary’ has been understood in two ways: as a temporal notion
(‘prior’) and as an evaluative notion (‘most important’). Analogical thinking that
enables best fit matching is clearly temporally prior to most change, and primary in
that sense. Analogization by contrast involves the reconfiguration of the features or
‘internal dimensions’ (Gisborne 2011: 156) of a construction. One example is the
mismatch between the syntax and semantics of the binominals discussed above.
Another is the subsequent constructionalization involving syntactic head shift. Ana-
logization therefore necessarily entails micro-step changes, in other words neoana-
lysis. There is no issue of temporal succession here; analogization is neoanalysis.
Since all analogization is neoanalysis, but there can be neoanalysis without analogi-
zation, as we will show in chapter 3 with discussion of the rise of pseudo-clefts, as a
mechanism, neoanalysis is in our view primary in the sense of ‘more important’
because it covers more cases of change.
2.4 Types of links

In the discussion so far we have not distinguished types of link. Usage-based
construction grammars and Word Grammar distinguish two types of link in the
network. The one most often discussed in work by Goldberg and Croft is inheritance,
a taxonomic link,3 the other is relational, specifying the kinds of relations among
constructions (see Boas 2013 for a useful summary). We discuss the latter type first
(2.4.1) as its connection to the preceding discussion is the most obvious, and then
turn to inheritance links (2.4.2).
Reconfigurations of links, whether between micro-constructions, subschemas, or
schemas, are of particular relevance for constructionalization, as will be discussed
in 2.5.2 below.
2.4.1 Relational links

Relational links between constructions are of several kinds. Goldberg (1995) proposed
four types: polysemy, metaphorical extension, subpart and instance links.
Polysemy links describe the semantic links between the prototypical sense of a
construction and its extensions. While the syntactic specifications are the same, the
semantic ones are different. Goldberg gives the example of the ditransitive construc-
tion, which has the syntax [SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2] and the central semantics [X CAUSE
Y to RECEIVE Z]. A typical example is (10):
(10) Max gave Edward the robot.
But there are many related patterns in which the reception is constrained in some
way and which can be regarded as polysemous extensions, e.g.:
(11) a. Max refused Edward the robot. [[SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2] $ [X CAUSE Y not to
RECEIVE Z]]
b. Max made Edward a robot. [[SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2] $ [X ENABLE Y to
RECEIVE Z]]
Such polysemy links are usually discussed at the subschema level, not at the level of
individual micro-constructions, for example refuse in (11a) is an example of a class
of verbs of refusal including deny while make in (11b) is an example of a class of verbs
of creation including bake.
Anticipating later discussion in chapter 5.2.1, we mention here that we regard
‘polysemy’ to be a synchronic notion. For example, since as a temporal and as a causal
are synchronically polysemous. But to highlight the fact that the change is
3
Note that the term ‘inheritance’ does not, in the context of construction grammar, imply anything
about sources. It refers to strictly synchronic taxonomic relationships.
constructional and involves different links in the network, when a change occurs
resulting in a new constructional meaning or in constructionalization, we prefer to
follow Lichtenberk (1991) and use the term ‘heterosemy’ for the diachronic associ-
ation between two meanings. Changes to ME sithenes over time led to heterosemy,
with the temporal meaning being older than the causal.
Metaphorical extension links are those which involve a particular metaphorical
mapping. In accounting for the relationship between possible and impossible resul-
tative constructions, Goldberg (1995: 81–9) argues that many of the constraints which
are manifest can be explained by positing a metaphorical link. For instance there is a
metaphorical link between motion and change (The chocolate went from liquid to
solid), and another between location and state (She went mad), such that a change of
state may be understood as a metaphorical extension of change of location. Such
metaphorical links show resultatives to be metaphorical extensions of caused-motion
constructions. The association between the two constructions may be exemplified by
(12a) (literal, caused-motion) and (12b) (metaphorical, resultative):
(12) a. Lisa sent him home.
b. Lisa sent him wild.
Subpart links indicate the relationship between a construction and a larger one
that exists independently and of which it may form a part. The intransitive motion
schema as exemplified by (13a) is a ‘proper subpart’ of the caused-motion schema as
exemplified by (13b):
(13) a. The toddler walked to the door.
b. She walked the toddler to the door.
Finally, instance links occur when a particular construction is a ‘special case’ (Gold-
berg 1995: 79) of another construction. For example, when the verb drive (with a
particular sense) is used in a resultative construction, the result-goal argument can be
drawn only from a limited set of constructions: while it is possible to drive someone
crazy, nuts, or up the wall, it is ordinarily not possible to drive someone happy, delighted,
or up the staircase, in the sense of affecting their emotions. In other words, X in drive
someone X is often associated with negatively oriented semantics (crazy) or is idiomatic
(up the wall). We will not be discussing this type of link except in as far as it pertains to
degrees of sanction by a schema. At various times in their histories constructions may be
more or less constrained. Whether or not a particular micro-construction is a special
case may depend on whether it is on the margin of a constructional schema (see 2.5.1).
How are these relational links associated with spreading activation? Relational
links are central for particular kinds of priming. Relational links typically exist
between reasonably closely related concepts (e.g. between intransitive motion and
caused motion), and closely related concepts prime one another in a conceptual
network (Hudson 2010: 76).
2.4.2 Inheritance links

The inventory of constructions is structured and may be represented in terms of a
‘taxonomic network’ of constructions, where each construction is a ‘node’ in the
network (Croft 2001: 25). Inheritance links are a central part of the constructional
network in many versions of construction grammar, including those of Goldberg
(1995, 2006), Fillmore (1999), Kay and Fillmore (1999), and also in Hudson’s (2007a,
b) Word Grammar. Inheritance relations are taxonomic constraints and allow for
categorizations at various levels of generality. Goldberg says that in her model of
construction grammar:
constructions form a network and are linked by inheritance relations which motivate many of
the properties of particular constructions. The inheritance network lets us capture generaliza-
tions across constructions while at the same time allowing for subregularities and exceptions.
(Goldberg 1995: 67).
Each node inherits the properties of its dominating nodes. Thus John runs is a
construct of the English intransitive construction, which is a member of the English
subject-predicate construction. Inheritance allows information to be represented
only once, ‘at the highest (most schematic) level possible’ (Croft 2007b: 484).
Goldberg suggests that inheritance links show that relations between constructions
may be partially arbitrary but also partially predictable. In other words, they may be
partially motivated and ‘influence each other even when they do not literally interact’
(Goldberg 1995: 72); in her model, inheritance links are asymmetrical: ‘construction
A motivates construction B iff B inherits from A’ (italics original). This allows partial
sanction in the sense of Langacker (1987): construction B inherits properties from
construction A but has some additional features specific to that construction. Inheritance
accounts for the fact that most verbs in English are formed with the past tense morpheme
-ed, but some are not, in the following way. At the most abstract level, verbs may combine
with past tense and ‘default inheritance’ spreads to individual micro-constructions.
However, some, e.g. ride, run block the default inheritance with a specific exception.
An important characteristic of inheritance in the constructional network is that
expressions typically inherit from several constructions. This is called ‘multiple
inheritance’ (Goldberg 2003). For example, (14) inherits from interrogative subject-
auxiliary inversion, negative, passive, present perfect, and transitive constructions:
(14) Hasn’t the cat been fed yet?
Multiple inheritance occurs in the case of intermediate constructions, e.g. fam-
ously the gerund displays properties of both Ns and Vs (e.g. having in We were
talking about Mary having a beautiful garden) (see Hudson 2007a: chapter 4 for
discussion of gerunds and their multiple inheritance). When we take a historical
perspective we may find that features of any or all of the constructions relevant in
multiple inheritance may undergo change. In fact, in English, some of the formal
properties of interrogative subject-auxiliary inversion, negative, passive, perfect, and

transitive constructions have undergone constructional change.
An advantage of inheritance links is that they ‘capture the fact that all noncon-
flicting information between two related constructions is shared’ (Goldberg 1995:
74–75), and show ‘systematically related form and systematically related meaning’
(Goldberg 1995: 99). For example, members of the family of ditransitives inherit from
the syntactic template [SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2] combined with the semantic template
[X CAUSE Y to RECEIVE Z]. However, there are some problems with some applica-
tions of inheritance, see Croft (2007b), Sag, Boas, and Kay (2012), and Sag (2012). One
concerns those positions in which inheritance links are largely tied to form (e.g. Gold-
berg 1995). Formal inheritance links must be thought of together with other types of links
if a full understanding of networks is to be achieved. For example, because there is a lack
of shared form between the double-object ditransitive and its ‘paraphrase’: the prepos-
itional double object construction (also known as the Transfer-caused-motion con-
struction), e.g. Jane gave Kim a book and Jane gave a book to Kim), and because they have
different distributional properties, Goldberg (1995: 100) says they ‘are not related by an
inheritance link’. They are, however, related by meaning, and Goldberg (1995: 91)
mentions a semantic synonymy-link. Perek (2012) uses experimental data to suggest
that language-users are able to make generalizations over formally distinct constructions
such as the ditransitive and its prepositional paraphrase. As we mention below in 2.5.2,
there appears to be historical support for this finding as well.
2.5 Growth, obsolescence, and reconfiguration in a network

We have argued that there may be constructional changes to individual micro-
constructions in a network. These do not create new type nodes shared by a population
of language users. Such nodes arise only when constructionalization occurs. Network
growth and the development of new families of construction types are phenomena that
are characteristic of the kind of conceptual network that derives from usage events in
which abstraction and extension of earlier constructions are typical. Families of
construction types may be gathered into schemas, sometimes with subschemas. Some-
times, however, subschemas or some of their members become obsolescent. Links in
the network may even be broken. Such changes are the topic of this section. In 2.5.1 we
consider growth from the perspective of the life-cycle of constructions, with particular
attention to entry into a schema at the margins, staying at the margins, and obsoles-
cence. In section 2.5.2 we discuss reconfiguration of the network.
2.5.1 The life-cycle of constructions

In 2.3.1 we mentioned that new constructions are often marginal members of a
schema. Here we focus on implications for growth of the network.
2.5.1.1 Growth at the margins Growth in the network has to date most often been
associated with grammatical constructionalization (Gisborne 2011, Trousdale 2012a).
In grammatical constructionalization a succession of small neoanalyses (‘pre-
constructionalization constructional changes’) may lead to the creation of a new
micro-construction. One of the most cited examples is the development of modals in
English. In OE there were several verbs with modal meanings (ability, desire, etc.)
and various combinations of formal properties that made them unlike other verbs
(e.g. Lightfoot 1979, Plank 1984, Warner 1993). Warner includes (p. 135, 152):4
(a) subcategorization for the plain infinitive rather than the to-infinitive (compare
wolde gan ‘wanted to go’ with He gedyrstlæhte to ganne upon ðære sæ ‘He
thirsted to go upon the sea’),
(b) preterite-present morphology,
(c) use of past tense forms without past time reference,
(d) lack of non-finite forms (e.g. mot- ‘be able’),
(e) cliticization of negative (e.g. nolde ‘not wanted’),
(f ) occurrence in ellipsis (e.g. Deofol us wile ofslean gif he mot ‘The devil will kill
us if he can’, p. 112),
(g) transparency to impersonal constructions (i.e. they lack an independent
subject in impersonals) (e.g. Hit wolde dagian ‘It was about to dawn’ (literally
‘it wanted to dawn’) p. 126).
Not all premodals shared all these properties, e.g. will- was not preterite-present,
but scul- ‘shall’ and mot- ‘be able to’ were. While the premodals were initially main
verbs, by OE they were on the margins of the verb category because of such
characteristics. Because of their meanings, they were, however, relatively frequently
used, sufficiently so that over time some, like will- and scul- came to be distinct from
their precursors. By ME others began to be used in similar ways. The past tense forms
must (base mot-) and ought (base ag- ‘own, have a debt, owe’) became fixed and
separated from their present tenses (mot- was lost in standard English, and owe is no
longer thought to be related to ought). This is a type of change known in the
grammaticalization literature as ‘divergence’ (Hopper 1991). The past tense forms
could, might, and should came to have specialized modal functions separate from can,
may, and shall. With the rise of do-support these modals retained old syntactic
patterns (e.g. inversion in questions, Can I take that one?) and became even more
distinct from other verbs than they had been. Eventually the set we now know as ‘core
modals’ became crystallized as a modal subschema of a growing auxiliary schema,
partly owing to systemic word order changes.
4
Warner notes that the first three are also mentioned by Lightfoot, but says he finds them significantly
more important than Lightfoot does.
We will show in chapter 4 that growth in the network is also associated with the
rise of some word-formation patterns. Suffice it to say here that in OE the noun dom
had a number of meanings, including ‘doom, judgment (as in Doomsday Book),
decree, command, state, condition’. Being a noun it could be modified, pluralized,
and so forth. It also appeared in several abstract noun compounds, many of them
quite frequently used, e.g. freodom ‘freedom’ with an adjective base (the oldest type of
compound), and martyrdom ‘martyrdom’ with a nominal base (Haselow 2011:
151–154). By the eleventh century, the end of the OE period, -dom began to be attested
with bleached meanings, and appears on grounds of type expansion and phono-
logical reduction to have been used as a derivational suffix. This illustrates gradual
growth and constructionalization in the network of a lexical schema [[ADJ/N] +
[dom] $ [‘entity denoting abstract state’]] (or in some cases, denoting place, cf.
kingdom).5 Marchand (1969: 262–264) documents its continued use to the present
day, in many cases with slightly humorous or deprecating pragmatics.
2.5.1.2 Staying at the margins Sometimes a schema may be robust, but certain
members (micro-constructions) are infrequently used, perhaps restricted in terms
of genre or group of speakers, and in that sense at the margins of the category
throughout their life-cycle. Hoffmann (2005: 143) lists the complex prepositions
attested one hundred or fewer times in the written part of the BNC. Of these,
twenty-five occur only ten times or less, among them in presence of, without breach
of, in distinction to, at cost of, by analogy to. Intuitively, a close look at text types
might suggest that some of these could be found fairly frequently in certain genres
(e.g. by analogy to in recent historical linguistics, at cost of in discussion of pricing).
And, as Hoffmann shows, what is relatively frequent in written texts, e.g. in spite of,
may not be in spoken (p. 106). Nevertheless, some complex prepositions are clearly
far more ‘central’ with regard to frequency and distribution than others, e.g. on top of.
Hoffmann says that in terms of, which first appeared in the nineteenth century but
was not generalized until the twentieth, is the most frequent complex preposition in
BNC (but even this complex expression is distributionally restricted, being very rare
in imaginative prose and leisure texts).
Hoffmann also shows that in front of, which competes with before (< be ‘by’ foran
‘from the front’ [OED]) in both spatial but especially temporal use, is not only rare in
ME when it first arose, but continues to be less frequent than before in PDE as
represented by the BNC (p. 150). Nevertheless, in front of has all the hallmarks of
grammaticalization: fusion as a unit, function as a preposition, and loss of lexical
meaning, but little phonological reduction. It appears that before has been specialized
primarily to temporal relations, in front of primarily to spatial ones.
5
We provide a more elaborate representation of lexical schemas in chapter 4.
These examples suggest that micro-constructions within a schema may be quite

variable in terms of their frequency and collocational possibilities and therefore may
be variable in terms of their prototypicality. Geeraerts’ (1997) discussion of the
importance of a prototype approach to semantic change deserves to be expanded
to constructional change and especially the notion of schemas and their subnetworks.
2.5.1.3 Marginalization and loss of a construction When a schema already exists, its
members, and indeed the schema itself, is potentially subject to decline and loss,
usually after a period of expansion. Givón’s cline (1979: 209) in which the final stage is
zero, has been very influential in work on grammaticalization:
(15) discourse > syntax > morphology > morphophonemics > zero
The zero in this cline is meant to represent loss. It appears to cover both complete
loss, such as the eventual loss of the infinitive marker -an in English, and also the
development of meaningful zeros. The latter are elements in a paradigm, e.g. present
habitual is typically not uniquely marked, compare They talk every day (present
habitual; zero marking) with They used to talk every day (past habitual, periphrastic
marking). Meaningful zeroes need not have a source in an overt micro-construction,
but may arise out of ‘the discourse and cognitive context’ (Bybee 1994: 241; 2010:
177–181). However, Givón had in mind those that arise out of earlier morphemes, e.g.
unmarked (zero) plural as in They think so. The zero plural results from the loss in
ME of OE -en plural inflections.
Givón says of (15) that it characterizes ‘cyclic waves’, that is, there will be ‘renewal’
(Meillet 1958[1915–16]). While, as Meillet pointed out, some categories are often
subject to loss and renewal, e.g. conjunctions and negation, others are remarkably
resistant to it: new members of the category may appear and coexist for a long time
(Hopper’s 1991 ‘principle of layering‘). Given (15) it is tempting to think of the rise of
a new micro-construction in a situation of renewal as ‘compensating for’ the loss of
the other. An extreme version of this concept is the idea that the new grammatical
category arises after the earlier one has gone to zero (is lost), e.g. that prepositions in
English were used to signal case after inflectional case was lost. Here ‘cycle’ is
construed as ‘circle’. Meillet (1958[1912]: 142), for example, speaks of a form disap-
pearing and leaving ‘une vide‘, ‘a void’ or gap that is then filled. His example is the
loss of the preterite, as in cecini ‘I sang’ and the rise of the periphrastic habeo dictum ‘I
have said (it)’ (later French j’ai dit ‘I said’), ultimately derived from the passive, e.g.
dictum est ‘it was said’. However, there is no evidence a void is created that needs to
be filled. Nor does the idea make sense since speakers presumably would not be able
to communicate well if there was no way to instantiate a category (unless another
variant continued in existence). As Lehmann (1985) points out, renewal takes place
simultaneously with loss; there is competition between the older and the new form so
‘cycle’ must be construed as a kind of parallel succession of changes, not as a circle
(see similarly Haspelmath 2000). Lehmann suggests that loss of case in Latin and
renewal by prepositions in Latin-Romance are ‘in mutual harmony’ with each other
(1985: 312).
An excellent example of the coexistence, with slightly different meanings, of an
older and a newer grammatical micro-construction is provided by the much-cited
first attested example of the Romance future that was derived from V + INF + habe-.
In a seventh century account of Frankish history by Fredegarius Scholasticus the
form daras ‘you will give’ with the -r- inflection < dare habes (‘to give you have’)
occurs side by side with the older future dabo with the -b- inflection. It appears in a
narrative about the alleged reason a city was named Daras. There is an exchange
between the defeated Persian king (ille ‘he’ in the first line of (16)) and Emperor
Justinian who has demanded certain territories:
(16) et ille respondebat: non dabo
and he responded: not give-1SgFUT
Iustinianus dicebat: daras
Justinian said: give-2SgFUT (Fleischman 1982: 68)
Dabo and daras clearly coexisted, but they did not mean exactly the same thing.
The older form can be translated ‘I will not give it’, while the newer one suggests that
the sense of modal obligation associated with the habe- phrase persists: ‘You have to
give it’. There is no evidence that the -b- future form was lost and then the -r- future
replaced it. Rather, they competed and eventually speakers chose the -r- form over
the older -b- form. Over time the obligation meaning of the -r- form was reduced
through frequent use, and the older -b-, which had competed with it, was lost.
Renewal is almost always constrained in some way and loss and renewal are not
mirror images of each other. Details of how the Romance future replaced the Latin
future are hidden in time. But ongoing examples of obsolescence in English are
provided in Leech, Hundt, Mair, and Smith (2009) and give us a window on the kinds
of things that can happen as a grammatical construction comes to be marginalized.
Leech, Hundt, Mair, and Smith discuss the decline during the twentieth century of
the core modals in Standard English such as will, would, can, could, may, might, shall,
should, must, ought (to) and what they call need(n’t) (to distinguish it from the semi-
modal need to, which has many main verb properties). Among their general obser-
vations about the modals is that those core modals that were already less common at
the end of the nineteenth century (may, must, shall, ought (to), needn’t) have declined
significantly more rapidly than those that were not already declining. Differential
rates of decline can be found in British and American varieties, and decline is more
noticeable in speech than in writing. This means that while members of the schema
(nodes in the network) may be in decline, they are not equally so: just as we witness
individual micro-constructions coming to be added to a schema over time, so we may
witness individual micro-constructions falling out of use, one by one.
Leech, Hundt, Mair, and Smith (2009) pose the question whether the decline of
core modals is correlated with the rise of semi-modals such as BE going to, BE able to,
HAVE to, as might be expected given the general shift from synthetic toward more
analytic syntax in English, discussed in e.g. Krug (2000). They show that in the
written corpora, the increase in semi-modals is much smaller than is the loss of core
modals. However, in the more limited evidence that they have from spoken corpora,
semi-modals have a much higher frequency, and a subset: HAVE to, BE going to and
WANT to, are beginning to rival core modals in frequency. All the same, at the end of
the twentieth century, as evidenced by a variety of electronic corpora, core modals
still outnumbered semi-modals 1.8 to 1 even in the variety that has undergone the
greatest amount of change, spoken American English (p. 101). So, to the extent that
there is a correlation between expansion of the semi-modals and loss of some older
core modals, it is as yet weak, and evidenced primarily in spoken English. However,
in one case a core modal, dare, appears to have been so rare that it has become a
hybrid, with some features of core modals and some of quasi-modals with to, e.g.
negative is favored without do-support, but interrogative with it (He dared not go,
Did he dare to go?) (Schlüter 2010). Schlüter relates this hybridity to avoidance of
stress clash: the infinitive is favored if dare would otherwise be followed by a stressed
verb (e.g. non-stress-clashing dáres to spéak is preferred over stress clashing dáres
spéak).
A particularly interesting finding in Leech, Hundt, Mair, and Smith from a
constructionalization perspective is that over the twentieth century there has been
a tendency for the polysemy of some modals to be reduced, e.g. may (a relatively
frequent modal), is becoming restricted to epistemic (‘it is possible that’) uses, and its
permission uses are being taken over by can (p. 84–85). Should, also a relatively
frequent modal, is being weakened to a marker of the non-factuality of the predica-
tion, i.e. of mood (p. 86); however, must, though on a steep decline, retains both its
deontic (‘be obliged to’) and epistemic meanings (p. 89). The reduction of the more
marginal auxiliaries is discussed in terms of ‘diminishing functionality’ and its
symptoms (p. 80). One symptom of diminishing functionality is ‘paradigmatic
atrophy’: shall is now almost completely restricted to first person subjects. If it occurs
with third person subjects, this is almost always in the context of ‘stipulative’ speech
acts, e.g. (p. 80):
(17) This agreement shall enter into force upon signature.
Another symptom of diminishing functionality is ‘distributional fragmentation’
(p. 81): increasing restriction to certain genres or even texts. Loss of polysemy
links involves loss of semantic generality; loss of paradigmatic and distributional
freedom involves loss of productivity. The obsolescence of the marginal core modals
has not yet led to loss of schematicity of the core modal construction, since all
members are still used. However, the individual trajectories of each micro-
construction suggest that alignment within the larger macro-envelope of core modals
is becoming rather weak during obsolescence, and that many core modals are
becoming restricted within the system. These are all constructional changes.
The constraints on competition and loss discussed so far have been structural or
genre-based (writing vs. speech). Constraints may also be regional. For example, OE
oþ (þæt) ‘to, until’ was replaced in its functions as preposition and subordinator
rapidly in early ME by till, a form found from earliest Old English on, but probably
reinforced by Scandinavian influence. This replacement appears to have started in
the East Midlands (Rissanen 2007). In present day British English negation with do-
support is favored with past tense of possessive have (They didn’t have any boots), but
the default in the North is the older form hadn’t (They hadn’t no boots) (Schulz 2011).
How should loss be modeled in a constructional network? Interestingly, the very
same principles we adopted for growth can be applied to obsolescence, though we
must usually add the further factor of ‘competition’ in the constructional network.
According to Hudson (2007a) the change from token node to type node occurs when
the former persists in memory, as mentioned in 2.3.3. Persistence in memory is aided
by frequent and repeated use of similar tokens, which allows the language user to
generalize, and through this, a construction may be created as a result of repeated
exposure to similar tokens. Conversely, infrequent use of a construction—evidenced
by infrequent constructs sanctioned by that construction—will lead to the weakening
of that part of the constructional network to the extent that the construct is reinter-
preted by speakers and hearers as not being sanctioned by a more productive
construction. It may be assigned to a niche.6 In the nineteenth century, for example,
-dom, came to be used largely with pejorative meaning, cf. duncedom, gangdom, a
meaning which persists even when the N itself does not have negative semantics
(attorneydom) (Marchand 1969: 264); recent examples are Blairdom (Trousdale
2008a) and Obamadom. Sometimes a formerly productive subschema may obsolesce,
like the subschema with the form [ADJ + dom], of which few members remain, e.g.
freedom, wisdom.
During obsolescence, erstwhile productive and compositional patterns become
idiosyncratic and unproductive. The generality of the type reduces, and the template
sanctions fewer and fewer instances. The resulting loss of productivity may eventu-
ally lead to non-use and severance of the link between a subschema and a micro-
construction. By way of example, consider the following constructional template
deriving nouns from adjectives: [[ADJ + th] $ [‘entity with property denoted by
ADJ’]]. This historically fairly productive template allowed for the creation of forms
6
Assignment to a niche does not necessarily involve obsolescence, however; see e.g. Torres Cacoullos
and Walker (2009) on use of will and BE going to in complementary niches in Quebec English. Blythe and
Croft (2012: 278) call this kind of change ‘reallocation’. It is related to the kind of reorganization discussed
in the next section.
such as warmth, health, truth and so on. It was a pattern that formed part of a more
general deadjectival noun-forming schema. This schema includes subschemas with
the forms [ADJ + ness] and [ADJ + ity]. Over time [ADJ + th] became less productive
compared to the other templates. What became entrenched in later generations was
not the general pattern [ADJ + th], but only its instantiations, stealth, truth and so on.
In scenarios like this, language users are less frequently exposed to the more abstract
construction, which loses vitality, and becomes increasingly dissociated from the
more productive parts of the morphological network. Speakers neoanalyzed forms
such as wealth, depth and breadth not as instances of a more general pattern that
attaches a suffix to a morphophonological variant of an adjective, but as simple
monomorphemes. In some cases the more general types can be reduced in generality
to the point that they are so isolated that they are not understood by language users as
being instances of a family at all, for instance, where historically productive patterns
of word-formation are lost, and all the forms originally generated by that construc-
tional schema are treated as monomorphemes (e.g. OE [ADJ/V + -sum] > ModE
buxom, lissome, winsome). Such examples also demonstrate the gradient nature of
analyzability: buxom is less analyzable than tiresome, for instance. Note that this is a
property of the various micro-constructions: tiresome is more analyzable because the
base is recognizable as a verb, while bux- in buxom is at best a cranberry morpheme
(see further chapter 4, especially 4.6), and more likely simply unanalyzed as an
instance of a complex schema, and treated as an atomic adjective.
Loss of subschemas may be particularly common in the lexical domain, but it
occurs throughout the constructional network as illustrated by loss of subtypes of the
ditransitive construction (see 2.5.2 below). Sometimes more radical obsolescence
occurs and a whole set of subschemas may cease to be used. Consider in this regard
the English impersonal construction, a subtype of the transitive schema (cf. Me
thirsts, Me likes it). There were a number of subtypes within the impersonal con-
struction in the OE period, depending on the case of the nominal arguments.
Restricting the discussion here to verbs with two arguments, Experiencer and Source,
we can establish three subschemas as illustrated in Table 2.1 (the subtypes are labeled
N, I, II following Elmer 1981 and Allen 1995).
TABLE 2.1. Subtypes of the English impersonal construction

Type Case of Experiencer Case of Source
N Dative or accusative Genitive

I Dative Nominative
II Nominative Genitive
Different verbs appeared in different impersonal subschemas in OE. Some were

restricted to a particular micro-construction (e.g. lystan ‘desire’ appeared only in type
N, laþian ‘loathe’ appeared only in type I, and behofian ‘have need of ’ appeared only
in type II), while some could appear in two subschemas (sceamian ‘shame’ in types II
and N) and one in all three (ofhreowan ‘rue’) (Allen 1995: 85). Over time, the
subschemas fell into disuse as increasing numbers of speakers of English coded the
relationship between Source and Experiencer with the more general transitive con-
struction that had ‘nominative’ subjects (e.g. I rue my mistakes, She loathed him). The
loss of these impersonal subschemas in the constructional network occurred grad-
ually: for example, lician ‘to cause/feel pleasure’ appears to be restricted to the type
I subschema in OE. As the transitive construction became more and more productive
and general, lician began to be attested in the transitive construction with the
grammatical case markings of nominative for subject and oblique for object, i.e.
this particular impersonal was used in alternation with the transitive form. But even
as late as the EModE period, vestiges of the old pattern persisted. This persistence can
be observed in examples where the subject of like has the thematic role of Source and
the object the role of Experiencer (18a), and in others where the subject has the role of
Experiencer, and the object the role of Source (18b):
(18) a. these two, trauelinge into east kent, resorted
these two travelling to East Kent went
vnto an ale house . . . and callinge for a pot
into an ale house and calling for a pot
of the best ale, sat down at the tables
of the best ale sat down at the table’s
ende: the lykor liked them so well, that they
end the liquor pleased them so well that they
had pot vpon pot.
had pot after pot
(1567 Harman [HC cefict1a; Trousdale 2008c: 310])
b. yf my cosin like it, I will send him more
if my cousin likes it, I will send him more.
(1627 Meautys to Cornwallis [CEEC Cornwall; Trousdale 2008c: 310])
This gradual loss of the impersonal (on which see further Trousdale 2008c)
correlates with a number of separate systemic changes in ME, including the loss of
morphological case and the development of the obligatory (morpho)syntactic sub-
ject, which together promote the development of the transitive construction. Non-
nominative subjects become gradually more and more atypical. The impersonal and
its subschemas have disappeared from the English constructional network. In other
words, there is no micro-construction whose verbal arguments are a non-nominative
pronoun and a clause. This is manifest in the absence of constructions like Them rues
that X or Us likes that X and in the status of methinks in contemporary English.
A remnant of the impersonal construction, methinks is no longer sanctioned by a
productive impersonal construction in the synchronic grammar. Rather it has been
neoanalyzed as an epistemic or evidential adverb functioning as a metatextual
marker meaning ‘apparently’ or ‘in my opinion’.
Many constructions are very long-lived, e.g. as long as in the temporal sense has
been used (with changing phonology) from EME times on. But sometimes construc-
tions are used for a short while only. Examples include use of do in affirmative clauses
in EModE (Nevalainen 2004), of aspectualizers such as stinten and finen, both
meaning ‘finish’, in ME (Brinton 1988), and of all as a quotative at the beginning of
the twenty-first century (Buchstaller, Rickford, Traugott, and Wasow 2010). There
appears to be nothing inherent in a micro-construction that leads to long or short
life. The determining factor is convention in a population of speakers. Nor does there
appear to be anything intrinsic in a schema that leads to long or short life, high or low
productivity.
2.5.2 Reconfiguration of links

Changes over time in the network are not limited to creation and loss. As a result of
on-line processing and neoanalysis there may be changes in the configuration of families
of related nodes in the network, in other words, of subschemas and even schemas.
An example of change in inheritance links is provided by Colleman and De Clerck
(2011) who show that several subtypes of ditransitive that had developed by the
eighteenth century have been lost, marginalized or reduced. The subschema of
verbs of banishment or exclusion (e.g. banish, dismiss, expel, forbid) has essentially
been lost in standard British English. Colleman and De Clerck (2011: 194) cite the
examples in (19):
(19) a. I therefore for the present dismiss’d him the Quarter deck. (1771 Cook,
Journal [CL 1])
b. he therefore forbade her the court. (1744 Walpole, Letters [CL 1])
Other subschemas have been severely reduced. For example, there has been loss of
some verbs of benefaction (water, as in she watered me the plants) and communi-
cation (repeat as in repeat you a sentence). However, there may be differences in
acceptability if the recipient is a pronoun, e.g. shouted him the answer.7 Some
7
There may also be differences among varieties of English. Hoffmann and Mukherjee (2007) identify
several ‘unusual’ ditransitives in Indian English and conclude that e.g. He informed me the story is an
innovation in this variety. However, Colleman and De Clerck (2011: 197–198) include inform among a larger
ditransitive set of communication verbs that have become obsolete in standard English since the eighteenth
century, so it may actually be a residue from earlier colonial times.
members of the subtypes that have been lost, especially verbs of manner of locution
(e.g. shout, whisper), have been recruited to what Goldberg (1995: 89–91) calls the
transfer-caused-motion construction, or the ‘prepositional paraphrase’ of the ditran-
sitive (Max gave the robot to him). Historically the relationship between manner of
speaking verbs and the ditransitive and transfer-caused-motion construction appears
to have been very close from early ME on since some verbs, especially manner of
speaking verbs, have been alternating between both (see Sowka-Pietraszewska 2011)
for over a millenium. As mentioned in 2.4.2, Goldberg (1995: 89–91, 2006: 9) argues
that the ditransitive and transfer-cause-motion constructions have only apparent
similarity; indeed, ‘the ditransitive and its prepositional paraphrase are not related by
an inheritance link’ Goldberg (1995: 100). They do, however, appear to have had
significant synonymy links over time, and to support Perek’s (2012) conclusion cited
above in 2.4.2 that language-users can generalize over alternations even when these
do not have the same formal properties.
One of the most detailed studies to date of reorganization of inheritance links is
Torrent (2011, Forthcoming) using a FrameNet analysis. Torrent discusses changes in
Peninsular and then Brazilian Portuguese of the inheritance links8 shared by the family
of para infinitive constructions of which the current central type is illustrated by:
(20) Ela mandou o dinheiro para mim pagar o livro.
she sent some money for me buy-INF a book
‘She sent money for me to buy a book’. (Torrent Forthcoming)
According to Torrent the syntax of this construction is [NP V para (NP) VINF] and
its meaning is [Adjunctive Purpose]. The subtype in (20) is a blend of the Transfer-
ence and Purpose constructions. He argues that a small family of modal purposive
constructions was reconfigured in the thirteenth century and expanded in such a way
that from the twentieth century on it inherits from aspect as well as modality.
Furthermore, the set of subtypes has been expanded from four to eleven.
An example of changes in polysemy links is provided by Patten (2010, 2012) in her
account of types of IT-cleft. She proposes that the IT-cleft was originally a focus
construction in which the post-copular focal element is identified or specified (as
opposed to being described and predicated) and the relative is a presupposed relative
clause equivalent to PDE (21):
(21) It was Sally who killed her. (Patten 2010: 226)
In (21) Sally is the focus, and is specified as the unique member of a set (people who
killed her, which is expressed in a presupposed relative). Patten argues that this
specificational IT-cleft is attested from OE on with NP foci, but constraints on the
8
Torrent includes relational polysemy, metaphor and subpart links under inheritance, so the changes
are more complex than suggested here.
post-copular slot have gradually been relaxed over time, such that prepositional
phrases, because-clauses and even adjectives can also be focused as in (22):
(22) a. It’s in December that she’s coming.
b. It’s because it is your birthday that she is coming.
c. It’s not sick that he was but tired. (Patten 2010: 239, citing Kiss 1998: 262)
Furthermore, the informative presupposition IT-cleft, in which new information is
presented in the relative clause, is also an extension of the IT-cleft. In (23) the relative
clause is not accessible from the context, or known to the hearer, but marks ‘A PIECE
OF INFORMATION AS FACT, known to some people although not yet known to
the intended hearer’ (Prince 1978: 899–900, capitals original), as in:
(23) (start of a lecture)
It was Cicero who once said, ‘Laws are silent at times of war’.
(Patten 2010: 222, 234)
Patten argues that the development of the Informative Presupposition IT-cleft is an
extension that is linked by polysemy to the Focus IT-cleft and not a separate construc-
tion as Prince (1978) and Ball (1994) suggest. Patten’s argument is supported by the fact
that Informative Presupposition IT-clefts are specificational and imply the relative is a
known fact (see also Lambrecht 1994). Early examples can be found in ME, but the
frequency does not increase significantly until the modern period.
2.6 Categories, gradience, and gradualness
As indicated in chapter 1, we understand the network of constructions to be non-
modular. Every node is a complex of form-meaning structures. At the micro-level,
some constructions are primarily contentful. These are specific instances in most
languages of the more general constructional types which refer and predicate,
frequently characterized as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Prototypically these are
‘lexical’ and refer to entities, situations, and descriptions in the world. Other con-
structions are primarily ‘grammatical one than other subnetworks because it is
aspectual and iterative. It is the outcome of successive constructional changes in
which verbs’. They are grammatical and range from markers of case, tense, aspect,
and modality to markers of information-structure (topic and focus), and of speaker’s
attitude to what is said (pragmatic markers, comment clauses). There is a gradation
from contentful/lexical to procedural/grammatical, with noun, verb, adjective at the
contentful pole and abstract markers such as mood or topic at the procedural pole
(Lehmann 2004, Brinton and Traugott 2005, Muysken 2008). A particularly clear
example of this gradation is the category of adverbs in English since it is made up of
partly lexical and partly grammatical constructions. In English, which has a very rich
system of adverbs, manner adverbs tend to be on the contentful end of the
continuum, e.g. foolishly, fast, while focus marking adverbs, e.g. only, even, and
degree adverbs like very, quite are on the procedural end. In some other languages
with more restrictive adverbial systems, most or all adverbs may be primarily on the
procedural end of the continuum (see Ramat and Ricca 1994).
The categories that instantiate lexical and grammatical material are gradient in
that some are ‘better’ representatives than others of the category in question. Essen-
tially the idea is that categories are not homogeneous or discrete. This concept relates
to ‘goodness of exemplar’ and ‘degree of membership’ as developed in prototype
theory (see e.g. Rosch 1973, Geeraerts 1997, and later developments within cognitive
linguistics such as are summarized in Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2007). Denison
(2010) discusses some of the problems with idealized, rigid categories, illustrating
with discussion of fun (N with ADJ properties, cf. very fun, fun time). Aarts (2007) lays
out the problems in far greater detail, exemplifying with examples like utter (a ‘poor’
member of the category ADJ, because it cannot be used predicatively: *The nonsense
was utter, or as a comparative in *utterer nonsense). Bybee (2010: 2) illustrates the ways
in which ‘lexical morphemes change their meaning and nature depending on the
company they keep’ with go, which often behaves like a lexical motion verb, but is
less lexical, more procedural in e.g. go wrong, go ahead (and), go boom, let’s go have
lunch, go-quotative (as in and I go ‘What do you mean? ’ ), and BE going to (future).
As constructions change over time, and especially as lexical items in certain
contexts are recruited by speakers to serve grammatical purposes, instances of what
may be relatively ‘good’ exemplars of their categories (and may remain so) typically
undergo ‘decategorialization’ and lose some prototypical characteristics. For example
the OE lexical verb mag- ‘have the power’ could be used as a non-finite verb, intransi-
tively with a PP, and in a variety of tenses. When it was routinized and recruited to a
grammatical modal construction, non-finite and intransitive uses obsolesced—its
verbal status was decategorialized (Plank 1984, Warner 1993). In this case, the original
verb mag- was eventually lost. When the quantifier any was agglutinated to the noun
way as in anyway (adverb and later pragmatic marker), the N ceased in this fixed
phrase to be used with nominal modifiers such as adjectives and determiners or in the
plural—its nominal status was decategorialized. Way came to be a poor representative
of N in this construction. However, the original noun way and the quantifier any
continued to exist side by side with the new construction anyway.
Usually only one feature of a construction changes at a time. This means steps are
small. A succession of small discrete steps in change is a crucial aspect of what is
known as ‘gradualness’ (Lichtenberk 1991b). We understand ‘gradualness’ to refer to
a phenomenon of change, specifically discrete structural micro-changes and tiny-step
transmission across the linguistic system (Traugott and Trousdale 2010a).9
9
This understanding of ‘gradualness’ is to be distinguished from the one prevalent in the generative
literature (e.g. Roberts 2007), where ‘gradualness’ is used to refer to transmission or diffusion across
networks of speakers.
Synchronically it is manifest in small-scale variation and ‘gradience’ (‘changes are

always manifest in synchronic variation’, Andersen 2001: 228). This means that at any
moment in time changing constructions contribute to gradience in the system.10 An
important distinction we would make in this regard is that while gradualness (change
over time) may be generationally discrete, gradience (variation in the synchronic
grammar) cannot be. Another important point is that, given the model we are
adopting, the ‘small steps’ may not be on a continuous unidirectional path, but
links from one feature to another across nodes.
Since ‘steps’ are instantaneous, even though small, and the network is multidirec-
tional, the question arises whether there are any changes that are not gradual in the
sense outlined above. For example, are there changes that occur as singletons and not
as the result of a series of changes? We have suggested that the answer to the latter
question is positive, at least in the domain of lexical micro-constructionalization.
Examples include borrowings and conversions (for the latter see chapter 1.5.4 and
chapter 4.8). A second question is whether there are changes that are abrupt in that
they are large-step changes. This question has been addressed extensively in the
grammaticalization literature where there has been discussion of whether reanalysis
is abrupt and if so whether it has anything to do with grammaticalization. For
example, Haspelmath (1998) dissociated reanalysis from grammaticalization on the
grounds that reanalysis is abrupt. Lehmann (2004: 10) also dissociated reanalysis
from grammaticalization, more on the grounds that reanalysis is a two-step process
not a series of changes, than because it is abrupt. Roberts (1993) on the other hand,
proposed that grammaticalization is a subtype of reanalysis. Much of this debate
hinged on the fact that Lightfoot (1979) privileged large-scale changes in morpho-
syntax resulting from massive cumulation of small steps, variously referred to as
‘catastrophic’ or ‘cataclysmic’ changes. In the 1990s the parameters of generative
syntax were macro-parameters, so any parameter change was necessarily conceptual-
ized as large-scale and abrupt. By the beginning of the twenty-first century many
generative syntacticians had turned to micro- rather than macro- parameters (e.g.
Roberts 2010, van Gelderen 2011), so that parametric change was necessarily recon-
ceptualized as small-scale. We take the position that reanalysis (or rather neoana-
lysis) involves a micro-step change. Such a micro-step may or may not create a new
node in the network. Some neoanalyses are constructional changes; these do not
create new type-nodes in the network. Series of constructional changes may lead to a
constructionalization. This too is a relatively small step neoanalysis. In this case
neoanalysis results in the creation of a formnew-meaningnew type node in the net-
work. Sometimes cumulations of small-scale constructionalizations may lead to
larger-scale systemic ones, as Lightfoot (1979) rightly pointed out, but these systemic
10
For some challenges in thinking about the intersection of gradience with gradualness, especially in
the domain of grammaticalization, see Traugott and Trousdale (2010a, b).
changes themselves developed gradually, for example, the generalization of periphras-

tic expressions of case. We do not privilege them over individual smaller changes.
2.7 A case study: the development of the way-construction revisited

In this section we show how the approach outlined above can inform the study of a
change over several centuries by distinguishing between constructional changes and
constructionalization, identifying reorganization of subschemas, and considering
networks among schemas. We revisit the development of the way-construction, to
our knowledge the first set of historical changes to be investigated from a construc-
tion grammar perspective (Israel 1996), and suggest ways in which the original
analysis may be enhanced.
2.7.1 The way-construction in PDE

Some contemporary examples of the way-construction are:
(24) a. After tucking him in, Lindsay made her way down the stairs to the kitchen
(2012 Clipston, A Life of Joy [COCA])
b. she trash-talked her way into a Strikeforce title shot. (March 4th 2012,
Vancouver Sun [Google; accessed March 4th 2012])
Drawing on Levin and Rapoport (1988) and Jackendoff (1990) among others,
Goldberg (1995: 199) characterizes the form of the way-construction as:
(25) [SUBJi [V POSSi way] OBL]
Following Mondorf (2011) we suggest that OBL should be replaced by DIR(ectional)
since direction is crucial to the construction and needs to be distinguished from
obliques such as locatives (see 2.7.3). The way-construction implies that the subject
referent moves along a path, but none of the verbs that appear in the construction in
PDE according to Goldberg are in fact motion verbs; they include make, dig, and
belch, but not e.g. go, come, run. She suggests that the prototypical verb of this highly
productive construction is make, and the prototypical way-construction involves a
frame with three components: ‘the creator-theme, the createe-way, and the path’
(Goldberg 1995: 207). In many cases motion in the face of external difficulties or
obstacles is implied (force one’s way), but not in all (whistle one’s way). She relates the
construction to ‘fake-object’ resultatives (pp. 215–217), e.g.:
(26) a. He cried his eyes red.
b. He talked himself hoarse.
but argues that they are not members of the same construction because resultatives
are more restrictive. While we agree that the way-construction is different from the
‘fake-object resultative’, two points may be noted here. One is that some members of
a schema may be far more restrictive than others, e.g. a shred of is more restrictive
than a bit of in that it is preferred with negative polarity (e.g. not a shred of hope) and
with positive semantic orientation (positive hope, trust are preferred over semantic-
ally negative despair, falsehood); a shred of is also significantly less frequent than a bit
of. Therefore comparative restrictiveness is not necessarily a reason for claiming
separate schemas. A network approach allows for some constructions to be more
distantly related within and across schemas than others. The second point is that
since the way-construction normally occurs with a PP, a more relevant fake-object
resultative would be the subclass with PPs like (29):
(27) He worked himself into a frenzy.
In 2.7.5 below we mention Mondorf ’s (2011) suggestion that there is a historical
reason for the restrictiveness of the resultative compared with that of the way-
construction. A network account allows us to show that the resultative is now a
somewhat distantly related member of the network—not the ‘same’ construction, but
nevertheless closely linked.
Jackendoff (2002: 174) provides a more general characterization of the way-con-
struction than Goldberg and says it means ‘roughly “traverse the path PP while/by
doing V” ’. He notes that the verb in a way-construction must designate a process: it is
‘inherently a process verb (e.g. eat, whistle, roll) or else describes a repeated bounded
event (e.g. belch, joke, hammer)’ (Jackendoff 1990: 213). Although the string appears
to be transitive (way appears to be object), the construction is transitive in form only
and has ‘profound incompatibility with the passive’ (Jackendoff 1990: 216). Based on
various data bases and on frequency of attestation, Goldberg concludes that there are
two polysemous constructions, one central or basic, which she calls ‘means’ (means
of motion and creation of a path), e.g. make, dig, worm, and the other ‘a less basic
extension’, which she calls ‘manner’ (movement along a path in a certain manner),
e.g. clang, clack (p. 203); many of the latter are sounds that could accompany motion
along a path. In our terminology these are polysemous subschemas of the super-
ordinate way-construction schema.
Using the OED as a database, Israel argues, as does Mondorf, that the way-
construction arises out of several different ‘threads’ that coalesced largely through
analogical patterning, a hypothesis that we only partially support. Like Goldberg,
Israel uses the terms ‘manner’ and ‘means’, but the categorizations are not equivalent.
Israel’s first three threads are in fact subsets of Goldberg’s ‘means’.
(a) The ‘manner’ thread. This involves ‘verbs coding path shape, rate, and manner
of motion’ (Israel 1996: 221), as in (28a).
(b) The ‘acquisition or maintenance of possession of the path’ thread (mentioned
in a footnote on p. 221), as in (28b).
(c) The ‘means’ thread. This involves verbs coding path-creation (p. 223), as in
(28c).
(d) The ‘incidental activity’ thread (p. 224). This is largely populated by verbs of
sound that might be made during making of motion or creation of a path, e.g.
whistle, hem, haw (28d). It is what Goldberg calls the ‘manner’ construction.
We illustrate them with relatively recent examples from CLMETEV:
(28) a. therewith he winged his way into the deep sky. (1885 Pater, Marius the
Epicurian [CL 3])
b. How could she find her way home? How could she find her way about in
Santa Croce? (1908 Forster, Room with a View [CL 3])
c. before long I was out of sight of the camp, plowing my way through the
mud. (1894 Kipling, Jungle Book [CL 3])
d. The steamer . . . came at last in sight, plashed its way forward, stopped, and
I was soon on board. (1842 Borrow, Bible in Spain [CL 2])
Israel finds continuity from ME times in terms of the sets of verbs available (except
for pure motion verbs like go), and ‘consistency of usage’ (1996: 223).
According to Israel, what he calls the ‘manner’ thread ((a) above) is the earliest
subschema, appearing as early as the fifteenth century in a limited set of collocations
like motion go/run/wend one’s way. Later verbs like sweep, scramble, wing, worm
were added to this set. The ‘acquisition or maintenance of a path’ thread (b) with
verbs like take, find is also attested early. The ‘means’ thread (c) arose by the mid
seventeenth century with verbs like cut and smooth. Israel argues that these three
schemas intertwined, leading to the PDE construction. The fourth ‘incidental activ-
ity’ thread (d) developed in the mid nineteenth century; Israel comments that many
‘are still unacceptable for many speakers’ (p. 224).
Israel’s analysis, like Goldberg’s, was based in frame semantics and primarily
informed by the question how motion, path, manner, and cause are combined in
lexical items (Talmy 1985). It invokes analogy where categories appear to break down.
Despite its overall correctness with respect to the periods in which types of verbs
begin to appear in the textual record investigated, this analysis appears to over-
privilege manner. The early manner uses which Israel identifies are motion verbs
(run, wend).11 While run has some manner (speed) built into it, wend is more
problematic. Wend- was originally a transitive verb meaning ‘turn’, but the OED
lists an intransitive use meaning ‘go’ from the eleventh century. Its past tense went
became the suppletive past tense of go during the ME period, replacing yede. Most
11
Goldberg (1995: 204) also treats wend as a manner of motion verb. She includes it with thread, weave
as ‘methodical winding motion’ involving some difficulty on the path.
examples of wend appear to involve the plain intransitive motion sense, whether past
or present tense, for example:
(29) Eliezer is went his wei And haueð hem boden godun dai.
Eliezer has gone his way and has them bidden good day
‘Eliezer has left and bidden them good day’. (a1325(c1250) Gen. & Ex.
[MED dai])
Israel comments on the history of the way-construction:
The remarkable thing about this long evolution is the consistency of usage over the centuries.
In every period certain predicates—go,12 make, work, pursue, wing—tend to recur and pre-
dominate in usage. (Israel 1996: 223)
We investigate when and how the construction came into being and whether the early
data provide evidence of a construction similar to the contemporary one. Below we
develop two hypotheses. One is that although there is considerable continuity in surface
form, there has in fact been some substantial neoanalysis of the schematic relations
between way and the verbs with which it collocates. Specifically, there is little or no direct
continuity between use of go and manner verbs like scramble, wing, and worm. The
second hypothesis is that the main organizing factors are causative and non-causative
semantics (cf. Goldberg’s creation of a path and motion along a path). For PDE we posit
the schema in (30), using Jackendoff ’s (2002: 174) semantic characterization:
(30) [SUBJi [V POSSi way] (DIR)] $ [‘SEMi traverse the path PP while/by
doing V’]]
Reasons for this characterization will be discussed below, as will the subschemas of
this larger schema, some of which are causative.
2.7.2 Precursors of the way-construction

The development of the way-construction illustrates both how extant networks may
serve as contexts in which changes can occur and also the problem of assessing which
parts of the network are most relevant for a change to occur.
Two subschemas of the contemporary way-construction favour verbs used in
manner of motion constructions and in sound or activity accompanying motion
constructions. This is not how the way-construction was initially formed. In a search
for constructs with way in ME our corpora suggest that there were two distinct sets of
precursors with wei: an intransitive motion set, and a transitive set. MED (wei 2b)
comments that ‘wei and phrases such as on wei combine with almost any verb
12
This contradicts Goldberg’s hypothesis that go does not occur in PDE. We will show in 2.7.4 that
Israel is correct: go is still used (but relatively infrequently and only in a construction without DIR).
denoting locomotion, forward progress, or the like’. The sample provided in MED
includes citations with go, wend, fare, flee, and ride. These are used as unergative
intransitives. Of these, only ride clearly involves manner. Investigating the develop-
ment of intransitive manner of motion verbs, Fanego (2012a) chronicles steep increases
during ME, early and late ModE in the number of verbs specifying manner of motion.
Some were borrowed in ME from Old Norse (skip) and others from French (dance);
others were extended uses of verbs extant in OE (glide, walk (< walk- ‘roll’)). It appears
that despite the availability of manner of motion verbs in ME, probably none except
ride played a direct role in the development of the way-construction.
In addition to intransitives, a few of which could also be used transitively, like flee,
and ride, MED also cites some examples of wei with transitives, mainly the acquisi-
tion verbs nim- ‘take’, take. Israel cites the acquisition set only in a footnote (Israel
1996: 221), but since it is transitive and causative (‘cause self to have’), it probably
played an important part in the development of the way-construction. Being inter-
ested primarily in motion, manner, and cause, although he cites the verbs in question,
Israel does not focus on the intransitive–transitive distinction. However, as we will
show, the distinction and especially the acquisition thread are important in thinking
about what the grammatical status of way is in the ME and early EModE periods.
Before discussing the status of way in ME, we note that it may be used with POSS
(31a, b), but it also appears with a preposition as in (33b), with a demonstrative or
article as in (31c, d), and in the plural as in (31d):
(31) a. Þe kniht tok leue and wente his wei.
the knight took leave and went his way
(1390 St.Greg. 34 [MED clot])
b. Ryde on your wey, for I wille not be long behynde.
Ride on your way for I will not be long behind
(1485 Malory Wks [MED wei 2b (d)])
c. and to him þaene wei he nam.
and to him that way he took
(1300 SLeg.Becket 713 [MED wei 2b (b)])
d. And went the wayes hym by-fore.
and went the ways him before
(c1450 Parl. 3 Ages 37 [MED wei 2b (a)])
Another striking property of the examples, especially those with motion verbs, is
that few collocate with a directional:
(32) a. As he wende his wei, seh þis seli meiden Margarete.
as he went his way, saw this blessed maiden Margaret
(c. 1225 St. Marg. [MED wei 2b (a)])
b. Ah, flih, flih þinne wæi & burh þine life!

Ah, flee, flee your way and save your life!
(c. 1275 Layamon, Brut 8024 [MED wei 2b (d)])
An apparent exception is the adverb forth, which quite frequently collocates with a
motion verb in the MED data. However, it appears to be a mobile part of a complex
predicate (intransitives like fare/drive (forth)) and is not necessarily a directional adjunct:
(33) a. Moyses . . . ferde forþ on his weiʒ.
Moses went forth on his way
(c1175 H Rood 4/33 [MED wei 2b (a)])
b. In the see she dryueth forth hir weye.
in the sea she drives forth her way
(c. 1390 Chaucer, CT Melibee B. 875 [MED wei 2b (b)])
With hindsight early examples such as (32a) and (33a) might suggest routinizing of
way as a fake object as early as ME, what Israel (1996: 221) calls a general go-your-path
construction. However, this analysis is not supported since POSS is not required and
way appears not to have been a fake object that is the complement of the verb. In the
case of the intransitive unergative motion verbs way appears to have been used as one
of the larger class of adverbial adjuncts, some of which are PPs and some mono-
morphemic. In addition to collocation with an article rather than POSS (31c, d), use
in a PP (31b, 33a), and use in the plural (31d), among pieces of evidence that wei is not
a complement of the verb is (34). Here wei is part of an NP used as a directional
coordinated with another directional adverbial:
(34) Go we þane narewe pað and þene wei grene.
go we that narrow path and that way green
‘Let us take the narrow path and the green way’. (a1225 PMor. 343 [MED grene])
In the case of the transitives, way appears to have been parsed as an object at this
period. Evidence is provided by the use with an article (31c, 35a, c), object-inversion
(31c, 35a), separation from the verb (35a, b), and use with an adjective (35c):
(35) a. To þe castel med wiþoute toun Þun wei sone he nom.
to the castle meadow outside town that way soon he took
‘He soon took the path to the castle meadow outside town’. (c1325 Glo.Chron
A 11255 [MED castel])
b. Turne we to ure drihten on riht bileue . . . and
Turn we to our lord in true belief . . . and
maken us wei to him.
make ourselves way to him
‘Let us turn to our lord . . . and make a path to him for ourselves’.
(a1225 Trin.Hom. 129 [MED neighlechen])
c. The God of oure heelthis schal make an eesie wei to vs.

the god of our health shall make an easy way to us
(a1425 WBible Ps. 67.20 [MED eesie])
Note that (35b) is a reflexive construction (see French s’en aller ‘go, betake oneself ’).
As mentioned above, Israel (1996: 221) refers to a general go-your-path construc-
tion. He also comments that ‘any noun meaning something like “way” appears to
have worked in this construction’ (Israel 1996: 221), but he assumes this construction is
‘optional possessed path’ and does not give a further analysis. Among motion con-
structions in ME Fanego (2012b) found in the MED several instances of the noun pas
(‘step’) many of them with a possessive and a transitive verb (e.g. make, take) as in (36)
and hypothesizes that these were the template for the way-construction (p.c.).
(36) a. Toward temes he made his pas; & whan þat
toward Thames he made his way; and when that
he at temes come . . .
he at Thames came
‘He made his way toward the Thames; and when he to came to the
Thames . . . ’
(c1330 SMChron.(Auch) [MED maken v.1])
b. Joseph anon nom his pas And bed
Joseph straight-away took his way and asked-for
his bodi vppon þe tre.
his (Christ’s) body on the tree (cross)
(c1390 Dial.Bern.& V.(2) (Vrn) [MED nimen])
However, although such constructs no doubt played a role in the development of
the way-construction, pas also frequently occurs with an indefinite article or an
adjective. It appears to be an object. Therefore examples with both pas and wei
appear to be instances of an acquisition subschema of the transitive construction, in
which they function as a spatial object:
(37) [[SUBJanim VTRacquisition {(DET) pas/wei}OBJ]13 $ [‘SEMi take a path’]]
In sum, the hypothesis is that in ME there was no unique, productive way-schema
with a distinct form-meaning pattern, only constructs that were instances of an
intransitive motion construction and a transitive acquisition construction, some of
which happened to include the lexical/referential construction wei. A simplified
representation is provided in Figure 2.2.
13
The notation {(DET) pas, wei}OBJ is a shorthand to indicate that only those instances of the
transitive acquisition construction which combine with a determiner and an object that is pas or wei are
relevant.
ITR cxn TR cxn
… way-motion acquisition …
(with wei object)
Figure 2.2 Way-patterns at the beginning of the 17th century
2.7.3 Constructionalization of the way-construction

By the early sixteenth century we find increasing preference in MED and the Helsinki
Corpus for an unergative pattern restricted mainly to deictic motion verbs like go
(without e.g. forþ) and come, POSS rather than definite article, wei rather than ways,
and without a preceding preposition. In religious texts in HC it is typically not
followed by DIR (38).
(38) Iesus saith vnto him, Go thy way, thy sonne liueth.
Jesus says to him Go your way, your son lives
And the man beleeued the word that Iesus had spoken
and the man believed The word that Jesus had said
vnto him, and he went his way.
to him and he went his way
(1611 King James Bible, New Testament [HC centest2])
However, in other text types a directional is preferred:
(39) a. This poller then sayd to hym go thy way streyght to
this thief then said to him Go your way straight to
thend of y=t= long entre.
the end of that long entrance
(1526 Hundred Merry Tales [HC cefict1a])
b. So wee toke our leve of hyme, and came our wayes bake
so we took our leave of him and came our ways back
agayne to Huntyngeton.
again to Huntington
(b1553 Mowntayne, Autobiography [HC ceauto1])
Such examples suggest that a relatively routinized deictic motion verb + way
meaning ‘go along a path’ construction with POSS indexing an animate subject
was emerging as a subschema of the intransitive construction. Semantically these
examples are relatively compositional: motion is expressed by the verb and path by
way, but syntactically they do not conform to any regular adverbial pattern. Way,
which was a member of DIR patterning with e.g. there, has been neoanalyzed as fake
object, the complement of a motion verb, perhaps analogized with the transitive
acquisition pattern in (37). There is therefore mismatch between the syntax and the
semantics.
While the set of intransitive motion verbs was being narrowed in EModE, the
transitive set was being expanded in EModE with take (which has replaced nim at
this time) as the prototype. There is construction-type (host-class) expansion of
POSS way to new verbs including make, and pave, sometimes with non-animate
subjects. These are causative (take is ‘cause to receive’ and make is ‘cause to come into
being’). DIR becomes distinctly preferred. Particularly interesting in this connection
is an account of the eruption of Mt. Ætna by the Earl of Winchilsea, Ambassador to
Constantinople, who was in Sicily when the eruption occurred. After the eruption,
torrents of volcanic fires destroyed all things in their way (an obstruction expression).
The torrents split into several streams, one of which is described in (40a). The further
progress of the volcanic stream over the next two days is described in (40b) and (40c):
(40) a. [The fire] on the East part ruin'd the lower part of Mascalucia, and
LePlacchi, taking its way towards this City.
b. on which day fell abundance of Rain, which abated not the progress of the
Fire; which on the East side had from Mascalucia made its way to St.
Giovanni di Galermo, the lower part whereof it destroy'd.
c. the stream of fiery Matter which destroyed the lower part of St. Giovanni di
Galermo divided it self into two parts, one of its branches taking its way
toward Mosterbianco. (1669 Winchilsea, Relation of the Earthquake and
Eruption of Mt. Ætna [Lampeter msca1669.sgm])
Notable here are priming by all things in their way, the apparent alternation between
take its way and make its way, and the use of the construction with a non-animate
subject. Such uses appear to be pre-constructionalization CCs that enabled the
development of the way-construction.
The textual data suggest that by the end of the seventeenth century a way-
construction with transitive verbs had arisen. It had been emancipated from the
transitive construction and was independent of that construction, although closely
networked with it because the verbs sanctioned by the way-construction are at this
time transitive:
(41) [[SUBJi [VTRcausative POSSi way] (DIR)] $ [‘SEMi cause to traverse a path’]]
This is a constructionalization: way no longer functions as an object, but is a fixed
part of a causative construction, in which a DIR is preferred. A number of new verbs
meaning ‘creating a path’ (the set that Goldberg considers prototypical for PDE)
are attested at this time. The path-creation is often achieved by some specific means,
e.g. fight, battle, force, push, drag, and often in the face of some obstruction or
opposition, e.g.:
(42) Afterwards about a dozen of them went into the Kitchin, forcing their way
against all the Bolts and Locks, making the very Iron Bolts and Wooden Doors
to yield to their wicked and bloody Designs. (1690 Trial of John Williams et al.
[OBP t16900430-8])
Two subschemas of the new way-construction can therefore be posited: one involv-
ing verbs of obstruction (e.g. dig, push), the other not (e.g. make, take).
There is a sub-formula of (41) with made (the best of) POSS way that has a modal
implicature. The examples involve adverse contexts in which the protagonist has
encountered some difficulty and is understood to make the best way they can to
wherever they are going.
(43) a. I will answer for it the book shall make its way in the world, much better
than its master has done before it. (1759-67 Sterne, Tristram Shandy [CL 1])
b. With men she is insupportable. I have never understood how that poor
woman has made her way. With women she is charming. But she seems
to be incapable of not treating men like dogs. (1908 Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale
[CL 3])
This construction involves an optional locative (43a) instead of a directional prepos-
itional phrase, which confirms that the designation DIR is to be preferred over OBL
in the way-construction.
Given the non-productivity in the seventeenth century of the intransitive schema in
terms of both type productivity (it was largely restricted to go), and token productivity, we
may hypothesize that at this time it was still part of the intransitive motion construction,
and therefore not yet part of the way-construction. The latter was transitive, causative,
and both type and token productive. However, both form and meaning similarities
must have allowed the intransitive subschema to be closely networked with the inde-
pendent way-construction. The reconfigured network is summarized in Figure 2.3.
ITR cxn way-cxn TR cxn
… way-motion obstruction no obstruction … …
FIGURE 2.3 Way-patterns at the end of the 17th century

2.7.4 Further expansion of the way-construction

From the end of the seventeenth century the kinds of verbs that can appear in the
transitive way-subschema expands exponentially. The semantics of verbs like force,
fight, dig involves some implied accompanying manner of action, especially in the
case of dig. A new subset of manner of action verbs—some of which are only
marginally causative or transitive—begins to appear, including beg, worm, and elbow:
(44) a. While elbowing my way through the unknown multitude that flows
between Charing Cross and the Royal Exchange. (1821 Galt, Ayrshire
Legatees [CL 2])
b. so I took a towel and crept out on the bank and wormed my way along on to
the branch of a tree that dipped down into the water. (1889 Jerome, Three
Men in a Boat [CL 3])
c. I saw the ponderous foreleg [of an elephant] cleave its way through the
jungle directly upon me. (1854 Baker, Rifle and Hound in Ceylon [CL 3])
Some of these, like worm and elbow, are conversions from nouns. Most imply
obstruction (elbow) or difficulty (worm, beg). The lexical verbs entail some kind of
manner (‘ask humbly (for food or money)’; ‘use one’s elbow’, etc.) but not motion.
The construction, however, imposes a motion meaning, a phenomenon called ‘coer-
cion’.14 This is particularly clear with worm which in other constructs at the time
meant and still usually means ‘extract worms from’—*I wormed quickly toward my
servant is not possible. He dug through does not mean quite the same thing as He dug
his way through; only the latter implies significant obstruction (contrast He dug a
hole). DIR is strongly preferred with these verbs, and seems to be almost obligatory
when the verb has little or no semantic link with motion.15
The directional adverbs home, (in)to, through, toward(s) are especially favored, but
many others also occur such as up, down, out of, eastwards, southwards. More than
one directional may be expressed as in (45). Some examples are attested of a non-
directional adverb between way and DIR. They are typically adverbs of manner
(quickly in (45a)) or accompaniment (with my poor outcast child in (45b)):
(45) a. I wormed my way quickly towards my former servant. (1898 Hope, Rupert
of Hentzau [CL 3])
b. I was banished the county, begged my way with my poor outcast child up to
Edinburgh. (1824 Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner [CL 2])
14
See chapter 5.2.2 for discussion of the concept of ‘coercion’.
15
However, as Mondorf (2011) points out, pursue X’s way is particularly unlikely to occur with DIR.
The possibility of using an adjunct before OBL (our DIR) is noted for PDE in
Jackendoff (1990: 212) and used to argue that there is a constituent break after way.
The set of verbs under discussion here, which share the semantics of manner to
some degree or another, appear to have enabled the further development of a
subnetwork in which accompanying action is inferred from use in the construction
(Israel 1996: 219). Israel (p. 224) notes that by the early nineteenth century some new
verbs appear, the semantics of which involves accompanying sound, e.g. plash as in
(28d) above, repeated here as (46b), and characterizes them as conveying ‘incidental
accompaniment’. However, the accompaniment is not necessarily incidental, as
shown by shoot (46a); here the shooting (of pheasants) is an intended accompanying
action. While plash in (46b) is not volitional and therefore intended, light splashing is
an inevitable accompaniment of a steamer in motion. We therefore do not use the
restrictor ‘incidental’.
(46) a. and shot my way home the next day; having . . . equally divided the game
between the three (1820–2 Hunt, Memoirs of Henry Hunt [CL 2])
b. The steamer . . . plashed its way forward. (1842 Borrow, Bible in Spain [CL 2])
Most contemporary novel examples are, like shoot and plash, of the non-causal
accompaniment type (e.g. trash-talk in (24b), giggle). Two striking things should be
noted. One is that members of this new set of verbs may be intransitive. Verbs like
dig, which can be either transitive or intransitive, may have been transitional types
enabling intransitive verbs of manner to be recruited into the construction. Such
verbs had been increasing since ME independently of way, especially verbs of sound
(Fanego 2012b). The second striking thing is that in the way-construction these verbs
are understood aspectually, as occurring iteratively. For example, in (46a) shot my
way home is understood as ‘repeatedly shot (pheasants) for the duration of my trip
home’. This is the set of verbs that fulfils the criterion of iterativity that Jackendoff
(1990: 213) suggests for the way-construction.
The ‘accompaniment’ subnetwork is a more procedural/grammatical one than
other subnetworks because it is aspectual and iterative. It is the outcome of successive
constructional changes in which verbs are recruited to the larger subschema. Many of
the constructs that express this subschema are ‘one-offs’ (also called hapax lego-
mena). Plag (2006: 543) argues that one-offs based on a pattern are ‘an important
measure for estimating the productivity of a morphological process’ (see also Baayen
and Renouf 1996). While comments of this kind are often made in connection with
word-formation, they clearly also apply to complex constructions generally. The
occurrence of hapax legomena suggests that the way-schema has become highly
productive. It is an example of a construction the members of which were originally
relatively contentful and lexical but that has been expanded in the direction of the
grammatical/procedural pole of the contentful-procedural gradient. It has come to be

‘intermediate’ between the two poles in this sense.
As a result of the expansion of verb types available and the growth of subnetworks,
it appears that in the early nineteenth century there was a reorganization of expres-
sions with the form [SUBJi [V POSSi way] (DIR)] linked to a motion meaning. They
were gathered into the contemporary schema, which appears above as (30), and is
repeated here as (47):
(47) [SUBJi [V POSS i way] (DIR)] $ [‘SEMi traverse the path PP while/by doing V’]]
This is a second constructionalization. By hypothesis, because the transitive way-
construction had been expanded to include intransitive verbs like beg and worm, the
way-subschema of the intransitive construction was analogized to the originally
transitive construction and absorbed into it, so that the way-construction now has
an intransitive motion subschema. However, it is marginal, still being type-restricted,
and notably different in form since DIR has become strongly dispreferred. A search
for went my/our/her/his/our/their way in COCA, for example yielded fifty-five hits,
all without DIR, e.g.:
(48) Ignoring her thanks, he went his way (2006 Stroud, The Golom’s Way
[COCA])
This shows that Goldberg’s statement (1995: 199) ‘none of the lexical items involved
entails motion’ is not correct (unless lack of DIR is the key here). However,
compared with found in the same contexts, which yielded seven hundred and fifty
six hits in COCA, most with DIR,16 and with elbowed, which yielded forty-six hits,
all with DIR, the motion subschema without DIR is clearly a marginal member of
the construction.
The productive subschema of the way-construction is a path-creation schema that
is no longer restricted to transitive verbs. It has further subschemas: a) a causative
path-creation subschema (itself with two sub-subnetworks, one involving obstruc-
tion (e.g. force), the other not (e.g. make)), and b) a non-causative subschema,
designating ‘iterative path-traversal with accompanying activity’ (e.g. worm, shoot,
trash-talk). The second of these is the most productive. In the case of the new
accompanying activity subschema of the way-construction, some of the verbs used
are relatively frequent (e.g. worm, elbow), others are one-offs or very rare (e.g. shoot,
giggle, trash-talk).
The new organization is shown in Figure 2.4.
16
Some found X’s way are used figuratively in the sense of ‘managed to succeed’.
ITR cxn way-cxn TR cxn
way-motion path creation

(ITR)
causative
accompanying activity obstruction no obstruction

th
Figure 2.4 Way-patterns at the end of the 19 century
2.7.5 Growth of the way-construction in a network

Goldberg (1995: 218) hypothesizes that the way-construction ‘is a conventionalized
amalgam of two constructions: the creation construction and the intransitive motion
construction’. This has been confirmed. It means that the way-construction is
historically linked with the intransitive and transitive constructions. However, this
amalgam is nuanced. Contrary to Israel’s and Goldberg’s hypotheses, go/come
intransitive type appears to have been restricted to a niche largely without DIR and
therefore to have been relatively marginal to the construction. A network relationship
appears to have developed in the seventeenth century independently of the go/come
subschema with intransitives that denote manner of motion (ride) and later with
intransitives denoting sound and other accompanying factors (plash). This set of
intransitives grew exponentially from the OE period on and were used in motion
constructions but most of which other than ride do not seem to have been used with
way until long after they appear in the textual record (Fanego 2012a).
Historically the way-construction is also networked with the fake-object resulta-
tive. Indeed Mondorf (2011) argues that the history of the way-construction cannot
be fully understood without reference to the competing reflexive -self construction an
example of which is cited above in (26b), He talked himself hoarse. Mondorf proposes
that the restrictiveness of the self-resultative in PDE that Goldberg cites is in fact the
result of competition of the resultative with the way-construction in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. She suggests that when the way-construction arose it was
aligned to the resultative, especially the self-schema. This confirms that it was
conceived as primarily transitive. Prior to about 1700 the self-resultative was used
in a range of uses that are now obsolescent or at least uncommon, e.g. work/wriggle
oneself + DIR. This is the period when the verbs denoting obstruction, like force,
came to be used more frequently with way and when manner of motion was
beginning to be employed (e.g. worm). In the period 1700–1800 Mondorf shows a
statistical cross-over effect with dramatic increases in way- and loss of -self. She also
identifies a division of labour such that -self constructions came in the twentieth
century to be favored with abstract resultatives (see (49a) with frenzy) while way-
constructions came to be favored with concrete resultatives (see (49b) with the steep
bank) (Mondorf 2011: 418, ft. 11):
(49) a. Worked himself into a frenzy and gave himself indigestion. (BNC wridom1)
b. . . . he worked his way down the steep bank toward the stream. (FROWN)
A question that deserves study is how and to what extent the way-construction is
intertwined and networked with the growth of manner of motion verbs in English
that Fanego details, especially those with sound like clink.17
2.7.6 The status of the way-construction on the lexical-grammatical gradient

Before we leave the way-construction, it should be mentioned that there is some
disagreement concerning where it fits on the lexical-grammatical gradient. For
example, Broccias (2012: 741) suggests that the way-construction is ‘on the lexical
side of the continuum’ because the sense of motion is retained, even if only figura-
tively in constructs like could have spelled his way through a psalm (1894 Macaulay,
Hist. Eng). However, Israel (1996) refers to it as a grammatical construction and
invokes grammaticalization. Mondorf (2011) hypothesizes that it is a case of gram-
maticalization on grounds that the noun way is bleached and decategorialized, and
the phrase POSS way becomes fixed. Gisborne and Patten (2011) argue that the way-
construction is a case of grammatical constructionalization because it involves
increased schematicity, host-class expansion (productivity with extensive analogiza-
tion), and category strengthening (the construction grows as it acquires subschemas).
To these arguments can be added the observation that a partially compositional
formula go/take one’s way has become non-compositional in meaning and the most
recent subschema (accidental accompaniment of path-making) is the most distinctly
procedural, being iterative. While it is not on the far end of the pole of grammatical
constructionalization, a close look at its history shows that speakers have interpreted
it over time in more and more procedural ways. The debate surrounding the way-
17
We are grateful to Teresa Fanego for this suggestion.
construction provides further evidence for a cline of constructions, ranging from the
most contentful to the most procedural.
2.8 Summary and some questions

In this chapter we have suggested ways in which a constructional view of grammar
can be adapted to account for innovation and change. The key to such adaptation is a
usage-based approach that is grounded in the assumption that ‘language as a whole is
a network’ (Croft 2007b: 509). Change is therefore complex. Crucially for a usage-
based model, what speakers produce are constructs, and therefore what hearers
process are constructs. There are clearly associations between constructs and the
more general types of constructions that are the subject of work on sign change. But
the consequence of the production and processing facts is that the construct is the
locus of change. Most changes are constructional changes, i.e. they are conventional-
ized changes that affect either the form or meaning of an existing node in the
network. Only constructionalization leads to the development of a new conventional-
ized type node in the linguistic network. We have also suggested that in thinking
about networks, a distinction should be made between i) individual knowledge, the
reflection of an individual mind, and the locus of innovation, ii) knowledge shared by
a population of speakers, the locus of coventionalization, and iii) changes to networks
that the linguist sees and identifies with language change.
In answer to the question raised by Rice (1996) how nodes and links develop (see
2.1), we have proposed that typically there is a series of several micro-steps leading to
constructionalization (instantaneous constructionalization is discussed in chapter
4.8). In what follows, we exemplify with a situation in which a hearer creates an
innovation, but speakers too may innovate. The first steps are:
(a) Innovation. The hearer interprets a construct and analyzes it in a way that does
not match the speaker’s analysis. In this process a best fit to some feature of a
node that is different from the speaker’s is made.
(b) The hearer who has created a tenuous link between the construct and a
different part of the constructional network than was intended becomes a
speaker and reuses the construct with the new link. At this stage, there is no
new micro-construction because there is no conventionalized use.
Conventionalization is potentially enabled when:
(c) Another hearer goes through a similar (but not necessarily the same) process.
Such processes typically involve i) loosely associating an invited inference from
a construct with the semantics of a construction that already exists in the
constructional network, ii) preferring to use parts of the construct in a par-
ticular distributional niche, or iii) repeating part of a construct as a chunk. As a
result of repeated associations, populations of speakers tacitly agree on a

conventional relationship between the original form and a newly analyzed
meaning. This leads to mismatch between the morphosyntax of the original
construction and the new constructs. Because of the conventionalization we
can say a constructional change has occurred, but there is still no new node in
the network. If constructionalization later follows one or more constructional
changes, we can say they are pre-constructionalization changes.
Constructionalization occurs only
(d) When morphosyntactic and semantic neoanalyses arising at step (c) have been
shared in population of speakers and a new conventional symbolic unit, hence
a new micro-construction (a new type node), has been created.
Post-constructionalization, further constructional changes can occur, notably:
(e) The type-constructions may be expanded and reorganized as subschemas.
Later there may be:
(f ) Reduction of form due to frequent token use, or obsolescence of construction-
types due to decreased use.
Thus constructionalization is typically the outcome of language users making not
one, but a succession of multiple, new links between constructs and constructions or
schemas. It is also the precondition for further series of changes.
In section 2.3.3 we suggested that at step (a) best fit is made to an extant feature in
the network. An important consequence of the bottom-up approach to the emerging
of constructions in individuals discussed in this chapter is that speakers/hearers
abstract minimally—only as much as is necessary to capture relevant generalizations.
They appear to follow some processing principle such as ‘Be as detailed as you can
while at the same time being as abstract as you must’. In many cases analogical
thinking is involved in this abstraction. The neoanalyses that bring about conven-
tionalized constructional changes or constructionalizations are small-step abrupt
changes. If they have exemplars, they are analogizations (which are themselves a
type of neoanalysis).
It remains to be determined how far the territory of a network extends (Rice’s
question (a)), but it is clear that it extends beyond inheritance to relational links,
including polysemous links, and to constructions that are regularly used as variants,
e.g. ditransitives and the prepositional construction (see 2.4.2). A tentative hypothesis
to be tested is that it may extend to any construction types with which some aspect of
form or of meaning is shared. Evidence of reorganization of subschemas demon-
strates that the answer to Rice’s question (b) whether elements can move closer and
further apart is positive, as demonstrated by the way-construction.
While the interpretation presented in this chapter of how new nodes in a network
may be understood from the perspective of change, particularly of how they grow or
become obsolescent, has answered several questions, it may have raised others about
our perspective on sign change and on the larger architecture of grammar. We draw
attention to two of these questions here.
Although we have spoken of ‘best fit’, ‘closeness’ and ‘distance’ in a network and of
‘families’ of constructions, we recognize that these notions are intuitive and meta-
phorical and will have raised questions. As a heuristic we have assumed that ‘best fit’
and ‘closeness’ can be measured by degree of match between features of form and
meaning—the closer the match between all features, and the fewer the variants, the
better the fit. For example, a bit of shows a closer fit to a lot of with respect to form
than a lot of shows to a great deal of, because the latter is preferred with an adjective,
while the former is dispreferred with an adjective. Semantically in PDE a lot of and a
great deal of show a closer fit to each other than to a bit of, because the latter concerns
small size, while the former concern large size. Pragmatically a lot of and a bit of are
closer to each other than a bit of is to a shred of because the latter has negative
polarity and is preferred with positively oriented nominal heads, whereas the former
are polarity neutral (for historical detail see chapter 3.3.5). But all are members of a
family of measure quantifiers because they are used to express amount. Notions such
as these need to be refined with reference to synchronic (perhaps neurological) as
well as historical research.
A related question pertains to the level at which matches are made. Booij (2010: 93)
has suggested that language-users may sometimes match to general schemas rather
than to individual exemplars. Indeed Israel (1996: 222) suggested that the chief
mechanism in the development of the new subschema that we have called ‘accom-
paniment’ was highly productive analogization to the abstract pattern of the way-
construction. However, more specific verbs expressing means (e.g. elbow, worm)
seem to be more plausible direct exemplars since they account for the fact that the
expansion pertains to manner of motion, and at later periods, most particularly to
sound. It seems plausible that schemas, being abstract, could serve as models.
Whether this is indeed so historically remains to be explored with fine-grained
corpus data.
In the next chapter we develop an account of grammatical constructionalization
and the steps that lead up to and follow from it, drawing on the usage model
developed in this chapter.
3
Grammatical Constructionalization
3.1 Introduction
In this and the next chapter, we discuss changes that result in constructions that are
primarily procedural in function (this chapter) or primarily contentful (chapter 4).
We draw on aspects of work in grammaticalization on the one hand and lexicaliza-
tion on the other since these have been two especially influential threads of research
in recent decades, and we seek to show how they can be partially rethought and
embraced in terms of a constructional approach. Given the architecture of construc-
tion grammar, we do not restrict ourselves to topics that have been traditional in
work on either grammaticalization or lexicalization, although each chapter begins
with relatively well-known views on these topics. Specifically, we show how changes
can occur at the schematic level as well as at the substantive level, at either end of the
grammatical-lexical gradient.
In the grammaticalization literature prior to interest in construction grammar,
focus was largely on the development of individual morphemes (‘grams’),1 which are
typically simple or ‘atomic’ in structure, and more often than not, specific or
‘substantive’. For example, although they grant that it is a simplification, in their
extensive study of cross-linguistic conceptual shifts from lexical to grammatical
material, Heine and Kuteva (2002: 7) assume that ‘there is essentially a one-to-one
correspondence between source and target’. However, in construction grammar,
constructions may be atomic or complex. Therefore, although some changes may
involve one-to-one correspondences, such as particular cases of binominal partitive >
quantifier, others may not, such as the development of the way-construction. Fur-
thermore, in construction grammar micro-constructions are usually considered to be
subtypes of abstract schemas. Typological work on grammaticalization has addressed
type-changes such as ITERATIVE > HABITUAL, MIRATIVE > EVIDENTIAL,
COMITATIVE > MANNER (see especially Heine and Reh 1984, Heine and Kuteva
2002, Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994). Here the focus has often been on semantics
1
‘Gram’ is short for ‘grammatical morpheme’. The term was coined by William Pagliuca according to
Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994: 2).
Grammatical Constructionalization 95
and how individual representatives of the grams with the relevant semantics have
developed. From a construction grammar perspective, however, there is interest in
how abstract form-meaning schemas themselves change as their members change.
Essential to this chapter are several concepts that have already been introduced.
They are:
(a) The notion of ‘grammar’. As conceptualized in constructional terms, ‘gram-
mar’ refers to the hypothesized linguistic knowledge system and includes not
only morphosyntax, semantics, and phonology but also pragmatics, and dis-
course functions (see chapter 1.1). This means that the range of constructions
considered to be instances of grammatical or procedural constructionalization
is quite extensive.
(b) The distinction between constructionalization and constructional changes, in
other words, the steps that lead up to constructionalization (pre-constructio-
nalization) and that follow it (post-constructionalization). Although this res-
onates with distinctions made in the grammaticalization literature, especially
Heine’s (2002) and Diewald’s (2002, 2006) work on contexts for grammatica-
lization, it pertains to lexical as well as grammatical constructionalization (see
chapter 1.5, chapter 4).
(c) The notion of gradualness and its intersection with gradience (see chapter 2.6).
The concept ‘grammatical/procedural category’ is an ancient one that goes back to
distinctions made in European grammars between major lexical classes (nouns,
adjectives, verbs), minor grammatical classes (articles, auxiliary verbs), and second-
ary, largely inflectional, categories (case, tense). Much of the early work on gramma-
ticalization concerned the development of categories such as tense, aspect, modality,
and case. These do not have to be expressed by grams (e.g. deictic tense can be
expressed by relatively contentful adverbs like today, yesterday, tomorrow, etc.), but if
they are, the grams associated with them tend to be highly general in meaning and
token frequent in use. Furthermore, they tend to originate in contentful members of
major classes. While we do not entirely ignore this set of developments, we are
mainly concerned in this chapter with examples of changes in two domains that have
been of more recent interest in the grammaticalization literature. One is the devel-
opment of partitives into quantifiers, not only as the substantive level of particular
construction but at the schematic level. The other is the development of the particular
type of focus-marking associated with the rise of pseudo-clefts in English (e.g. What/
All I did was go to the store). In both cases we highlight the way in which the schemas
as well as particular substantive instances of them develop. Hypotheses that changes
in schemas can be construed as having undergone grammaticalization were earlier
articulated in Trousdale (2008c), discussing the loss of the impersonal construction
in English and its effect on the transitive construction (see chapter 2.5.1.3), and as a
strong hypothesis in Rostila (2006):
the more schematic a construction is, the more grammaticalized it is. Thus, completely
schematic constructions like the ditransitive and transitive constructions in English (cf. Gold-
berg 1995) should represent the most grammaticalized of all constructions. (Rostila 2006: 53)
This is too restrictive. As we will show in chapter 4, some schematic constructions are
lexical, notably word-formation schemas.
The structure of this chapter is as follows. We start in section 3.2 by elaborating on
the two major current approaches to grammaticalization mentioned in chapter 1.6.2:
(i) grammaticalization as reduction and increased dependency, which we abbreviate
as GR, and (ii) grammaticalization as expansion, which we abbreviate as GE. We
show that these are not orthogonal, even though they may appear to be so on first
thought, and both need to be accounted for within a model of constructional change.
In particular we show that many properties of GE are not inconsistent with many of
the parameters of grammaticalization identified in Lehmann (1995). GE has a natural
affinity with grammatical constructionalization, and provides a framework for dis-
cussing patterns of exemplar-matching and analogization associated with expansion
and formation of families of constructions in schemas. At the same time, aspects of
GR need to be incorporated into a model of grammatical constructionalization since
many individual changes involve reductions of various kinds. A constructional
approach to directionality is discussed in 3.3 with respect to changes in productivity,
schematicity, and compositionality. It is suggested that grammatical constructiona-
lization is associated with expansion of productivity and schematicity but reduction
of compositionality. Ways of rethinking certain types of degrammaticalization in
terms of constructionalization are suggested in section 3.4. In 3.5 we present a case
study, the development of pseudo-clefts. Section 3.6 summarizes.
3.2 Approaches to grammaticalization

Hopper and Traugott summarize grammaticalization as a two-pronged branch of
linguistics in the following terms (note that ‘constructional’ and ‘constructions’ in the
following quotation are not intended in the sense of the present book, but in the pre-
theoretical sense of constituent and string):
(i) a research framework for studying the relationships between lexical, constructional, and
grammatical material in language, diachronically and synchronically, both in particular languages
and cross-linguistically, and (ii) a term referring to the change whereby lexical items and
constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions and, once
grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions. (Hopper and Traugott 2003: 18)
The research framework of grammaticalization clearly has much in common with

the objectives of work developed in the present book. However, we give grammatical
and lexical material equal attention. Definition (ii) is formulated in the more
traditional of two conceptualizations of grammaticalization that have developed in
the last decade, that of grammaticalization as reduction and increased dependency

(GR), while the definition in (i) is more open-ended and permits conceptualization of
grammaticalization in terms of expansion. While recognizing the danger of polariza-
tion by distinguishing different traditions, we nevertheless find it instructive to do so
when considering how grammaticalization can be rethought in constructionalization
terms to note that in research on grammaticalization, although researchers have
always been aware of both form and meaning changes, nevertheless often only one of
them has been the main focus of attention, while the other has been backgrounded in
specific research projects. As we will show below, expansion and reduction are in fact
intertwined.
In one tradition of work on grammaticalization, focus has been on form and
changes from relatively free syntax through morphology to relatively bound inflec-
tions (see e.g. Lehmann 1995, Haspelmath 1998, 2004). Examples are like those in (26)
in chapter 1.6.2, of which the first two are given here for convenience in (1):
(1) a. Latin cantare habeo ‘sing:INF have:1sg’ > French chanterai ‘sing:FUT:1sg’.
b. Old Hungarian világ bele ‘world core/guts:directional’ > világbele ‘into the
world’ > világba (inflected N bele > case marker ba).
In Latin cantare habeo varied with habeo cantare; not only was word order variable, a
constituent such as an object could intervene between the two words. By hypothesis
cantare habeo was a relatively free phrase that, routinized in the order given,
underwent the kinds of shift in (2):
(2) non-finite V - finite V > V stem + finite clitic > V stem + future inflection
Likewise vila béle in (1b) was a relatively free phrase that underwent a number of
changes, among them the kinds in (3):
(3) N - [relational N (‘guts’) + directional case marker] > N + primary (coalesced)
adposition > N + fusional case affix
In both cases the first lexical stem (cant-, vila) underwent little more than phono-
logical changes, whereas the second underwent fairly radical ones over the centuries,
including reduction and increased dependency. The stem in these examples
remained lexical/contentful and the second element became grammatical/
procedural.
Generalizations from particular instances such as are illustrated in (1) and (3) have
often been made in formats that attend to the form of the grammaticalizing item. For
example, verbal and nominal clines based on form have been proposed such as:
(4) a. lexical verb > auxiliary > clitic > affix (based on Hopper and Traugott 2003: 111)
b. relational noun > secondary adposition > primary adposition > agglutinative
case affix > fusional case affix (Lehmann 1985: 304)
Lehmann’s example of each part of the cline in (4b) is a relational noun like top
entering into a ‘construction’ (to be understood as ‘syntactic constituent’) like on top
of NP where it functions as a secondary adposition (see also Hoffmann 2005 on PNP
(preposition + NP) constructions). Here on top of expresses ‘an objective meaning’,
i.e. is lexical. A primary adposition is a morphologically simple, grammatical expres-
sion like of, and an agglutinative one is like the -s genitive. A fusional case affix is one
that simultaneously instantiates more than one morphological category, e.g. a Latin
case marker like -bus (ablative plural).
In the other tradition of grammaticalization research there has been focus on
semantic and in some cases pragmatic changes (e.g. Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer
1991, Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994). Examples include:
(5) a. Latin habe- ‘possess’ > ‘be obliged’ > ‘future’
b. OE scul- ‘owe’ > shall ‘future’
Semantic and discourse-pragmatic paths of change such as (6) have also been
proposed for generalizations over examples such as those in (5), e.g.:
(6) obligation > intention > future > purpose (based on Bybee, Perkins, and
Pagliuca 1994: 240)
The clines in (4) and (6) are linguists’ abstract generalizations over multiple
examples, languages, groups of speakers, and times (Andersen 2001: 241). They are
not hard-wired, nor are they mental processes (although they have sometimes been
interpreted as such, cf. Newmeyer 1998: chapter 5, 2001). They are the outcome of
cognitive processes that include parsing and analogical thinking.
As Kiparsky (2012: 18) points out, proponents of the two views illustrated by (4)
and (6) pose different questions and therefore highlight different aspects of gram-
maticalization. If one seeks to know how form changes, a ‘path’ such as from
auxiliary verb to clitic status (e.g. of auxiliary verb will > clitic ’ll) will be of central
interest. However, if one seeks to know how meaning changes such a structural shift
may be of only secondary interest. Instead, a path such as from volition (will as main
verb) to epistemic modality (Boys will be boys) to expression of future (She will win)
will be of foremost concern.
Cross-cutting the questions about form or meaning have been two opposed-
seeming models that we will show are in fact largely complementary. One fore-
grounds increase in dependency and reduction of various formal aspects of the
original expression resulting in grammaticalization, the other foregrounds expan-
sion, typically after grammaticalization has set in. Since reconciling these two
approaches is fundamental to our approach in this book, we elaborate on the
distinction in some detail. Important to the discussion will be i) the degree of
attention to changes on two axes that are often referred to as the syntagmatic and
paradigmatic axes, and ii) the hypothesis of unidirectionality.
The distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes (see Saussure 1959
[1916]), or selection and combination (Jakobson 1960: 358), is related to distinctions
that go back to Greek times between combination and similarity/choice, indexicality
(link to items in context) and iconicity (match).2 Although they do not map directly
onto these axes, the mechanisms of neoanalysis and analogization, and the processes
enabling (i.e. ‘motivating’) them, parsing and analogical thinking, have sufficient
similarity to be grouped with them in Table 3.1, which illustrates conceptual axes in
work on language change:
TABLE 3.1. Conceptual axes for work on language change

Domain Combination Similarity/choice
Structure Syntagm Paradigm

Index Icon
Mechanism Neoanalysis Analogization
Motivation Parsing Analogical thinking
As axes, the dimensions inevitably interact. If an icon matches or represents

something, by default it points to (or ‘indexes’) it (Anttila 2003: 433). Anttila (2003)
and Fischer (2007) argue that in fact ‘analogy’, understood as both analogical
thinking and the mechanism we call analogization, involves syntagmatic contextual
and combinatorial relations as well as paradigmatic matching. Anttila’s metaphor
from weaving of ‘warp and woof ’ invokes not only contextual, syntagmatic relations
(woof) and selected, paradigmatic relations (warp), but also the formulaic figurative
expression warp and woof ‘the underlying structure on which something is built’
(American Heritage Dictionary 2011). The intersection of the two axes is worked out
in some detail in Norgård-S!rensen, Heltoft, and Sch!sler (2011) where an approach
is developed to grammaticalization and constructions that privileges the paradig-
matic axis as a synchronic, stable set of semantic oppositions (p. 109) that result from
changes in syntagmatic valency and word order.
Work in the framework of the GR approach led to the hypothesis of unidirectionality
of grammaticalization, a hypothesis with a history that goes back at least to Kuryłowicz
(1975). Extensive discussion can be found in Norde (2009; see also Börjars and Vincent
2011).3 Particularly influential in the development of the hypothesis that there is a
predictable directionality to grammaticalization was the cline of changes proposed in
Givón (1979: 209). Already mentioned in chapter 2.5.1.3, it is repeated here as (7):
2
Other related pairs concerning semantic change include metonymy and metaphor, semasiological and
onomasiological perspectives.
3
Norde’s book presents a number of counterexamples to the unidirectionality hypothesis, some of
which will be discussed in 3.4.
(7) discourse > syntax > morphology > morphophonemics > zero
A more recent formulation, focusing on structural type rather than level of grammar
is Dahl’s (2004: 106) cline in (8):
(8) free > periphrastic > affixal > fusional
The development of French chanterai, Hungarian világba, or of English BE gonna
are prime examples of changes along this cline. Although claims about directionality
have sometimes been understood otherwise (see e.g. papers in Campbell 2001), this
observed directionality is not inherent in grammaticalization. As will be discussed
below in 3.3.5, we regard directionality as the result of various factors in usage, such as
repetition, strategies to ease articulation, etc. (see also Bybee 2010). These processes
are used by speakers of all generations. As Bybee (2010: 113) points out, directionality
is a puzzle on a view that change occurs as a result of innovations made by individual
children and between generations. But it is not a puzzle if the reasons behind the
processes in language use (e.g. parsing and analogical thinking by speakers of all ages)
are kept in mind. The kind of chunking that these changes evidence arises because
the forms are repeatedly used in the same order, whether by children or adults:
(‘the principal experience that triggers chunking is repetition’ Bybee 2010: 34), and
repeated chunks tend to be reduced phonologically.
As will emerge in the next subsections, a strong hypothesis of unidirectionality is
most clearly associated with GR approaches to grammaticalization but a weaker one
is also associated with GE. In grammatical constructionalization (and, as we will
show in the next chapter, in lexical constructionalization), directionality will be of
relevance not only to the development of micro-constructions, but also to the larger
schemas in which micro-constructions participate.
3.2.1 Grammaticalization as reduction and increased dependency

The model of grammaticalization as reduction and increased dependency is associ-
ated particularly with Givón (1979), Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer (1991), Leh-
mann (1995, 2004), Bybee, Pagliuca, and Perkins (1991), and Haspelmath (2004).
Haspelmath (2004: 26) defines grammaticalization in terms of the development of
‘stronger internal dependencies’, and Lehmann says:
Grammaticalization of a linguistic sign is a process in which it loses in autonomy by becoming
more subject to constraints of the linguistic system. (Lehmann 2004: 155)
The same kind of focus on loss and attrition can also be found in some more
semantically-oriented work, e.g.:
[Grammaticalization is] an evolution whereby linguistic units lose in semantic complexity,
pragmatic significance, syntactic freedom, and phonetic substance. (Heine and Reh 1984: 15)
It should be noted that the concept of grammar adopted by many of the founders
of the GR approach, with the notable exception of Givón, was modular, relatively
narrow, and until recently typically did not embrace such grammatical categories as
topic and focus (but see e.g. Shibatani 1991 and recently Lehmann 2008). It also does
not include pragmatic markers such as well, moreover, the British English tag innit
‘isn’t it’, clause final but, or other metatextual markers. These are sometimes con-
sidered to be on a separate ‘discourse’ level (see e.g. Wischer 2000, Kaltenböck,
Heine, and Kuteva 2011). In a construction grammar framework, however, they are
part of language and therefore part of a speaker’s constructional knowledge.
The most explicit hypothesis to date concerning reduction and increased depend-
ency in grammaticalization is Lehmann’s set of correlated factors, represented in
Table 3.2, which is drawn from Lehmann (1995: 164). Most pertain to changes in a
linguistic item, with minimal attention to the contexts in which that item is used.
It should be noted that the columns that Lehmann labeled ‘weak’ and ‘strong
grammaticalization’ refer to scales that are strictly speaking scales of grammaticality,
not to change. Many researchers on grammaticalization have assumed that ‘weak
grammaticalization’ represents a pre-grammaticalization developmental stage (those
identified in Diewald 2002 as ‘critical contexts’, and in Heine 2002 as ‘bridge
contexts’). However, Lehmann identifies change with the column labeled ‘process’
(cf. Lehmann 1995: 124). We have therefore modified the title and two of the column
labels of his table to reflect these facts.
TABLE 3.2. Correlation of grammaticality parameters (based on Lehmann 1995: 164)

Parameter Weakly grammaticalized Process Strongly grammaticalized
(a) Integrity Bundle of semantic Attrition Few semantic features; few

features; possibly segments or
polysyllabic monosegmental
(b) Paradigmaticity Item participates loosely Paradigmatization Small, tightly integrated
in semantic field paradigm
(c) Paradigmatic Free choice of items acc. Obligatorification Choice systematically
variability to communicative constrained; use largely
intentions obligatory
(d) Structural Item relates to Condensation Item modifies word or
scope constituent of arbitrary stem
complexity
(e) Bondedness Item is independently Coalescence Item is affix or
juxtaposed phonological feature of
carrier
(f ) Syntagmatic Item can be shifted Fixation Item occupies fixed slot
variability around freely
Grammaticalizing items are hypothesized to be reduced in structural complexity

and to increase in bondedness from left to right, along two intersecting dimensions:
paradigmatic choice (a–c) and syntagmatic combination (d–f). As Lehmann points
out, in some cases many or all the parameters may be at work in any particular
development. An example is the development of BE going to from ‘motion with a
purpose’ > BE gonna ‘future’,4 and it is used here to illustrate the parameters:
(a) Integrity; loss of meaning (lexical motion is bleached), and of form (e.g.
reduction from four syllables in BE going to to three in BE gonna and fewer
(rendered orthographically as I’ma, Ima) in some varieties such as African
American English (see e.g. Poplack and Tagliamonte 2000; Green 2002: 196).
(b) Paradigmaticity; BE going to was recruited into the set of periphrastic auxiliar-
ies; at the time, these were ought to, have to, be to.
(c) Paradigmatic variability; BE going to has been shown to be restricted to niches
in Quebec English (Torres Cacoullos and Walker 2009). However, constraint
on variability is weak—while BE going to appears to be on the ascendency
compared to will and shall, it is not yet and may never become the obligatory
marker for future (see Leech, Hundt, Mair, and Smith 2009).
(d) Structural scope; the string BE going to was originally distributed over two
clauses (the first a clause involving motion, the second a purposive headed by
to) and subsequently became an auxiliary within a single clause.
(e) Bondedness; to has coalesced with going in gonna, disallowing adverbs and
prepositional phrases from intervening.
(f) Syntagmatic variability; the sequence has been fixed in the auxiliary slot, and,
like modals, precedes aspect and passive markers (is going to have been cleaned
thoroughly).
The majority of Lehmann’s parameters have stood the test of time and are central
to most work on grammaticalization. Parameter (a), which evokes bleaching, has
been foundational in work dating back to the nineteenth century (e.g. Von der
Gabelentz 1901). It evokes loss of semantic meaning. Parameter (f ) underlies much
recent work on non-lexical origins of grammaticalization. Although grammaticaliza-
tion is often thought of in terms of lexical > grammatical change, in his article of 1912
Meillet referred to grammaticalization not only of lexical items but also of the shift
from Latin ‘free’ word order to French ‘fixed’ word order (what we now think of as
syntacticized subject-oriented word order). Lehmann (2008) explores the way in
which contrastive-focus biclausal cleft sentences may become fixed and reduced to
monoclausal structures. Building on Lambrecht (1994) he proposes that ‘The most
4
Aspects of the history of BE going to are discussed below in 3.2.2 and in chapter 5.3.4. ‘Future’ here and
elsewhere is to be understood as both ‘relative future’ and ‘deictic future’ unless otherwise specified; these
uses arose at different times, as is discussed in chapter 5.3.4.
explicit syntactic strategy of contrastive focus is sentence-clefting’ (Lehmann 2008:

211) and suggests that the dual clause structure may be grammaticalized over time
into a monoclausal topic-comment structure (p. 227). Grammaticalization of infor-
mation structure, he argues, ‘means that pragmatic relations lose their specificity’
(p. 213), complex sentences may be reduced to a simple clause or even a phrase
(p. 227). Here as elsewhere the focus of research is on loss, in this case of pragmatic
information-structuring.
The parameters have proved very useful in operationalizing certain changes,
among them degrammaticalization (Norde 2009), but some have also been debated.
One parameter has proved to be particularly problematic: (d), the parameter of
structural scope. For one, it led Lehmann himself to mistakenly state that nominal
gerunds (e.g. John’s constant reading of magazines) developed later in English than
the more complex verbal ones (e.g. John’s constantly reading magazines) (1995: 64).5
However, nominal gerunds are attested in OE, while verbal ones begin to appear only
in late ME and are not common until EModE (Rissanen 1999: 291–292). On a view of
grammaticalization as decrease in scope and increase in dependency, the develop-
ment of connectives and pragmatic markers seems anomalous because they increase
their syntactic as well as semantic scope. Because they are ‘outside’ the core clause,
some researchers regard them as outside of grammaticalization, and as instances of
pragmaticalization (e.g. Erman and Kotsinas 1993; see also Claridge and Arnovick
2010, Degand and Simon-Vandenbergen 2011, Diewald 2011a, for overviews of the
issues and divergent conclusions). But there have been clause-internal scope expan-
sions as well, e.g. the rise of predeterminers like exactly, quite within the determiner
construction, so syntactic scope expansion appears to be a historical fact. In any
event, since construction grammar is non-modular, and constructions include prag-
matic features, the issue is moot from a constructional perspective.
‘Obligatorification’, the process seen as leading to constraints on and loss of
paradigmatic variability (c), is another concept that has been debated. Its operation
is clear in languages with inflections, since in these languages agreement is usually
required, whether between verb and subject, as in English, French, and German or
also between modifier and noun, as in French and German. In highly inflected
languages like Russian, increase in obligatoriness and morphological paradigmaticity
typically coincide. But in others like English where there are few inflections, they may
not. In languages like Chinese with no or virtually no inflections neither obligatori-
ness nor paradigmaticity in the morphological sense can be particularly salient in the
language. Obligatorification has also been associated with the syntacticization of
subject such as occurred in the Romance languages and English, both of which at
earlier stages had word order that was constrained by information-structuring rather
5
As Lehmann says (1995: 64), verbal gerunds are not full clauses, but they are clearly more complex
than nominal ones, which in general terms function as nouns.
than syntax. Recently the notion of obligatorification has been expanded to cover
other areas of grammar. For example, building on Lehmann’s observation that
‘[s]omething is obligatory relative to the context’ (Lehmann 1995: 12), Diewald
(2011b) argues that a view of grammaticalization as creation of grammar calls for
obligatorification to be understood as being a matter of degree and as being not only
a structural but also a communicative phenomenon. When communicating, speakers
of German have to choose whether to use a member of the category of modal
particles, e.g. ja, eben, ruhig, and schon. These particles are primarily pragmatic in
function (and very difficult to translate). In conversation they relate the clause in
which they appear to a presupposed or pragmatically ‘given’ unit. For example, (9a)
presupposes a context in which language learning is being discussed and (9b) negates
a prior proposition, such as ‘It won’t happen’ (Diewald and Ferraresi 2008: 79, 84):
(9) a. Deutsch ist eben schwer.
‘German is really difficult’.
b. Es wird schon werden.
‘It wíll happen/It will work out all right’.
Diewald proposes that because modal particles in German are highly restricted
syntactically (to position after the finite verb), and on a continuum of pragmatic
function with a number of other markers such tense, aspect, and case, they are part of
grammar and furthermore speakers obligatorily have to choose whether to use one.
This obligatoriness is not structurally internal but communicatively external. It
derives from the constraint ‘If intention x, then form y’ (Diewald 2011b: 369). This
view is consistent with a constructionalist perspective.
A recent variant of the GR approach is the proposal by Boye and Harder (2012)
that grammatical expressions are ‘ancillary and as such discursively secondary’, while
lexical expressions are ‘potentially primary in terms of discourse prominence’ (p. 2).
Discourse prominence is defined in terms of potential for being in focus (p. 9).6 From
this perspective, grammaticalization is of two types depending on whether the source
is lexical or non-lexical. If the source is lexical it ‘consists in ANCILLARIZATION, a
CHANGE IN EXISTING DISCOURSE-PROMINENCE CONVENTIONS’ (Boye
and Harder 2012: 22; capitals original). But if the source is non-lexical it consists in:
CONVENTIONALIZATION OF A DISCURSIVELY SECONDARY MEANING as a property
of a new linguistic expression: a linguistic expression – for instance fixed word order – becomes
conventionally associated with a secondary meaning that was originally part of a pragmatic
total message, but not conventionally associated with any linguistic expression. (Boye and
Harder 2012: 17, capitals original)
6
Metalinguistic contrast is excluded, e.g. I didn't say ‘a’, I said ‘the’. Here the appropriateness of the
expression is the discursive point. Likewise contrastive focus is excluded on the grounds that paradigmatic
properties are invoked (see Boye and Harder 2012: 17, example 35).
On this view grammaticalization originates in competition for linguistic promin-

ence in the flow of speech. ‘Only losers qualify’, and expressions likely to lose out are
those that are used with high frequency relative to their uses with primary status
(p. 27). Although this view of grammaticalization suggests ways of addressing several
problems, among them how to approach changes without lexical sources, there are
several difficulties of which we mention only a few here. One is that it requires a
number of traditional grammatical expressions to have dual status, not only pro-
nouns which in some languages have ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ morphology, e.g. French
moi (‘I’ strong, stressed) vs. je (‘I’ weak, clitic, unstressed) but also prepositions,
question words, and so forth (p. 21) since these are ‘addressable’ in certain discourse
contexts, e.g. responses. Another is that this view of grammaticalization is difficult to
demonstrate in historical texts, in part because of the discourses available to us. As
Boye and Harder themselves say, construction grammar brings a challenge because
no sharp distinction is made between lexical and grammatical expressions (p. 34).
They define constructionalization as ‘the overarching change into a new whole
construction’ (pp. 35–36), without defining ‘whole construction’ and opt for con-
sidering constructions to be ‘the frame for the competition that the emerging
grammatical word or morpheme is in the process of losing’ (p. 37). As the brief
quotations suggest, Boye and Harder take a usage-model stance, but nevertheless
much of the argument is made as if linguistic elements conducted discourses on their
own and no detailed data analysis is provided. This idealization away from complex-
ities makes dichotomies such as Boye and Harder draw relatively easy to make.
Furthermore, it treats the proper domain of the output of the development of
grammatical expressions as the ‘word or morpheme’ and not the construction, a
position which is not espoused in this book.
3.2.2 Grammaticalization as expansion

For the most part, the GR perspective pays little attention to pragmatics (a notable
exception is the work of Bybee and her colleagues). But once pragmatics is taken into
consideration, the association of grammaticalization with loss becomes questionable,
and a ‘loss-and-gain’ model (e.g. Sweetser 1988, Brems 2011) seems more appropriate.
In the late 1980s various proposals were put forward to the effect that in the case of
grammaticalization, semantic bleaching is accompanied by the coding/‘semanticiza-
tion’ of pragmatic implicatures. Sweetser (1988) proposed that though the lexical
semantics of motion is lost in the development of future uses of go, the future
implicated by our experience of time is metaphorically mapped onto events and
may be semanticized as the abstract semantics of ‘future’. Crucially, ‘the meaning of
the target domain is added to the meaning of the word’ (Sweetser 1988: 400, italics
original). At the same conference Traugott (1988) proposed that the implicatures
relevant to grammaticalization are usually more akin to metonymy (associated with
the syntagmatic string), and metaphor is the result of coding of implicatures. Again
the emphasis was on increase ‘in the direction of explicit coding of relevance and
informativeness that earlier was only covertly implied’ (p. 413).
Although they adopt a largely GR approach to morphological fusion, Bybee,
Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994: 5–10) develop a view of grammaticalization that encom-
passes pragmatics and semantics, metaphorical and metonymic changes. In an early
(partial) precursor of a model of GE, they associate grammaticalization with gener-
alization, by which they mean expansion of use and meaning. Generalization of
meaning is loss of lexical specificity, in other words, bleaching. From the perspective
not of the form and its meaning, but of the contexts in which it occurs, this results in
loss of some collocational and other restrictions, hence expanded use. For example, as
an auxiliary BE going to has lost the ‘full value’ of movement in space toward a goal
(Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994: 3). This is Lehmann’s parameter (a). The
‘bleached’ future may be used in a paradigm and restricted to a fixed slot (Lehmann’s
parameters (b) and (f )), but it is no longer constrained collocationally to verbs
denoting actions in the way that motion with a purpose is. Sometimes the original
lexical/contentful value may be totally lost over time (e.g. deal in a great deal of as a
quantifier has lost the meaning of ‘part’), or partially (e.g. a bit (of ) retains the
meaning ‘small’, but not of OE bita ‘morsel, bite’ from which bit is derived).
Crucially, however, bleaching of lexical meaning is normally associated with increase
in grammatical meaning—further evidence of loss-and-gain. The pragmatic impli-
catures that enabled the grammaticalization have become part of the new semantics,
which is now more abstract, procedural rather than lexical. BE going to as an auxiliary
is no longer associated with motion with a purpose but as an auxiliary it means
future, a lot of as a quantifier no longer means ‘a piece of ’ but as a quantifier it means
‘much’. In both cases, generalization of meaning results in wider use.7
Himmelmann (2004) gathered together various ideas about expansion to construct
a model of grammaticalization (and lexicalization, on which see further chapter 4) in
which the focus is on expansion of semantic-pragmatic, syntactic, and collocational
range, usually after grammaticalization has set in, the model which we have given the
acronym GE.8 Himmelmann’s focus is on the contexts in which a grammaticalizing
item spreads. He restricts grammaticalization to changes involving ‘at least one
grammaticalizing element’ (p. 34), and excludes word order, compounding and
7
Counterexamples to the hypothesis that contentful, literal meaning precedes procedural meaning do,
however, occur. Hoffmann (2005: 67–71) cites by way of, saying it is not found first in collocations that
support literal path meanings, but rather with abstract ones such as ‘by means of ’ (MED provides
collocations with ‘alms, reason, gentleness, merchandise’). Only in the later eighteenth century do
examples appear that support the concrete, directional meaning ‘on the path of ’ (Hoffmann 2005: 68).
8
One of the earlier proponents of grammaticalization as a primarily morphological process, Kuryło-
wicz, said ‘Grammaticalization consists in the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a
lexical to a grammatical or from a grammatical to a more grammatical status’ (Kuryłowicz 1975: 52; bold
added).
other more abstract types of changes. However, citing Bybee and Dahl (1989) and
Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994), he argues that concentrating on the grammati-
calizing item alone is misleading, because items never grammaticalize out of context:
‘constructions (elements in context)9 and not individual items are the proper domain
of grammaticization’ (Himmelmann 2004: 31). For him ‘grammaticization is essen-
tially a process of context-expansion’ (p. 32). Himmelmann cites examples of the
development of the definite article in German. Examples given here are ours:
(a) ‘Host-class expansion’: a grammaticalizing form will increase its range of
cooccurrence with members of the relevant part of speech (noun, adjective,
or verb), e.g. expansion of future BE going to to stative verbs like like, know,
want, which were unavailable for the original purpose construction. This kind
of expansion leads to new collocations of a sign.
(b) ‘Syntactic expansion’: extension to more syntactic contexts, e.g. of future BE
going to to raising constructions (e.g. There is going to be an election), or of the
comparative measure phrase as long as (e.g. This plank is as long as that one) to
the left periphery of the clause where it is used as a temporal connective (e.g.
Hold it in place as long as it is needed). This kind of expansion leads to new
(morpho)syntactic configurations of signs.
(c) ‘Semantic-pragmatic expansion’: a grammaticalizing form will develop new
heterosemies,10 (two or more meanings or functions that are historically
related, see 2.4.1), e.g. the temporal connective as long as came to be used as
a conditional (e.g. As long as you leave by noon you will get there in time).
Of these three types of expansion, ‘semantic-pragmatic context expansion is the core
defining feature of grammaticization processes’ (Himmelmann 2004: 33). In his view
all three types cooccur in grammaticalization (Himmelmann 2004: 33). In our view,
and as will be illustrated below, some semantic-pragmatic expansion usually precedes
grammatical constructionalization, and host-class expansion may do so to a small
extent. (Morpho)syntactic expansion accompanies grammatical constructionalization
(cf. the pairing of formnew with meaningnew). However, all types of expansion may
continue after constructionalization, most especially host-class and syntactic expansion.
Since Himmelmann regards grammaticalization as expansion in syntagmatic
contexts of host-classes, and of syntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties, the
directionality he is concerned with is not toward reduction of the signal or toward
increased dependency or obligatoriness, but toward expansion of contexts. Host-class
expansion is collocational expansion. Syntactic expansion involves increase in
available syntactic uses. The example of as long as illustrates expansion from an
9
Note this is not a construction grammar use of ‘construction’.
10
As discussed in chapter 2.4.1, ‘heterosemy’ is a term for two or more meanings or functions that are
historically related.
adposition specifying an NP to a subordinator specifying a clause. It is a case of

syntactic (as well as semantic) scope expansion and supports suggestions that the
unidirectionality of scope-reduction (Lehmann’s parameter (d) in Table 3.2) needs to
be rethought. From a constructional view on change there is no problem if an adverb
or preposition is used as a subordinator. Given that pragmatics is an essential
element in construction grammar, inclusion of the development of pragmatic
markers (well, I think), German modal particles (doch, ja), and other expressions
the grammatical status of which has been questioned in restrictive theories of
grammar is likewise non-problematic. Currently they are widely accepted as
instances of grammaticalization on the grounds that their function is procedural,
cuing connectivity and interaction management (see e.g. Brinton 2008a, Diewald
2011b). Such acceptance requires, however, a broad definition of grammar.
Another kind of extension is seen when multiple different nodes are created from
one source. Rather than unidirectionality what we find here is multidirectionality, a
phenomenon known in the grammaticalization literature as ‘polygrammaticalization’
(Craig 1991, Robert 2005). Craig points to the development in Rama, a Chibchan
language of Nicaragua, of the verb bang ‘go’ into goal/purpose markers in the argument
structure domain and into progressive, desiderative, etc. in the tense-aspect-modality
domain. Multi-directional changes resulting in reflexes of a source construction in
more than one structural domain is illustrated less dramatically in section 3.2.3
immediately below by the development of beside into a preposition, subordinator
and pragmatic marker, with eventual divergence into beside and besides. The network
model should prove particularly conducive to study of changes of this type leading to
links with and creation of multiple different nodes from one source.
The GE approach allows for reduction and increase in dependency but sees them
as a function of the kind of grammatical category that is being developed (and as the
outcome of ease of signal articulation). In some domains such as case and tense,
grammaticalization may involve increase in dependency, whereas in the domain
of connectives and pragmatic markers, grammaticalization may involve decrease in
syntactic dependency. A definition of grammaticalization from this perspective is:
Grammaticalization is the change whereby in certain linguistic contexts speakers use parts of a
construction11 with a grammatical function. Over time the resulting grammatical item may
become more grammatical by acquiring more grammatical functions and expanding its host-
classes. (Brinton and Traugott 2005: 99)
3.2.3 The interconnectedness of the GR and GE approaches

The two views of grammaticalization as increased reduction and dependency (GR)
and as expansion (GE) might appear on first encounter to be in opposition with
11
Again, ‘construction’ is here used in the pre-theoretical sense of string, constituent.
respect to directionality. For example, Kiparsky (2012) proposes that unidirection-

ality can be accounted for in terms of a principled theory of analogy as optimization
and regularization based in UG. He concludes that on this view unidirectionality is
‘exceptionless’ (p. 49); apparent counter-examples are exemplar-based. All the same,
the GR and GE approaches are largely complementary, because, like the form and
meaning approaches Kiparsky (2012) identifies, they answer different questions.
Most proponents of GR ask primarily about development of morphosyntactic
form, therefore coalescence, fusion, and increased dependency are foregrounded.
A change from auxiliary verb to clitic such as will ‘intend’ > will (‘future’) > ’ll, or has
(‘perfect’) > ’s involves reduction of the signal and increased dependency, morpho-
logically on the host, and syntactically in terms of constraints—cliticized auxiliaries
do not appear in yes-no questions, or as responses, for example:
(10) a. I’ll be leaving soon.
b. Q. *’ll you be leaving soon? A. *I’ll.
c. She’s left.
d. Q. *’s she left? A. *She’s.
By contrast, GE asks questions not only about changes in an item but also about
how grammaticalization occurs in context, and often after grammaticalization has
set in. Many aspects of GE follow from GR factors. For example, collocational
type-expansion is the logical outcome of Lehmann’s parameters of integrity, para-
digmaticity, and paradigmatic variability. If we focus not on reduction but on the
consequences of that reduction, we can expect that there will be increase in host-
classes: a form that is reduced semantically and has paradigmatic functions will also
be used more token frequently and in more contexts. It will also be available for a
larger range of syntactic uses, and therefore its syntactic contexts may expand.
There are, however, some areas in which GR and GE predict different outcomes of
grammaticalization. Most pertain to Lehmann’s parameter d) of structural scope
which, as mentioned above, has proved problematic independent of GE. In the case
of changes from clause-internal adverb (e.g. after all) or of adverbial clauses (e.g. as
you say, as I think) to various kinds of pragmatic marker functions there is often a
change in meaning from contentful to procedural (sometimes involving reduced
segments and bonding), followed by recruitment to clause periphery position as a
pragmatic marker (expansion of syntactic scope). One of these functions may be to
mark the speaker’s metatextual evaluation of the relationship of the upcoming clause
to what has been said before. We call this ‘discourse particle function’ (see Fischer
2006). Subcategories of discourse particles include those that connect back anaphori-
cally and also point forward cataphorically, like inferential then, a class that Schiffrin
(1987) and Fraser (1988 and since) identify as ‘discourse markers’. Others are pragmatic
comment clauses, e.g. I think (Brinton 2008a). Use as a discourse particle is not the
logical outcome of condensation, though it is related to expanded use. In these cases
form is typically reduced through freezing and/or coalescence early on. After recruit-
ment to discourse particle function there is often prosodic differentiation from the
original source (see Dehé and Wichmann 2010 on sentence-initial I think in different
functions in PDE, and Wichmann, Simon-Vandenbergen, and Aijmer 2010 on of
course). This is consistent with findings that higher-frequency expressions are shorter
in duration and prosodically different from low frequency homonyms (Gahl 2008).
Beside(s) provides a historical example. In OE as now, side was a noun designating
a body part, and by extension, the long surface of an object (OED side II.4). Originally
used with a number of prepositions in phrases like be/on his sidan ‘at his side’, it came
to be fixed as a preposition (11a) and adverb besiden/beside(s) ‘aside, at the side,
nearby’ (11b):
(11) a. Seth wuneda on ana munte beside paradise.
Seth lived on a mountain next-to paradise
(a1200 Annot Cld.OT 421 [MED paradis(e) 1.a; Rissanen 2004: 158])
b. Arthur teh bi-side; and said to iveres . . .
Arthur turned aside and said to followers
(c1300 Layamon’s Brut, Otho C.13, 12982 [MED beside(s) 3a; Rissanen 2004: 161])
This is a standard case of recruitment of a lexical noun designating a body part to
an abstract function (see Heine and Kuteva 2002). Its development is an example of
change in Lehmann’s parameter a), integrity, in this case loss of concrete spatial
meaning. It is also a standard case of increased dependency and reduction. Be ‘by’
was selected from a set of prepositions including on, æt ‘at’, fram ‘from’, þurh
‘through’, and coalesced with the noun side (Rissanen 2004); this is a change of the
type typical of Lehmann’s parameter e), bondedness. However, in ME the adverb
beside, and especially the extended form besides (with adverbial -es, as in dæges
‘daily’, niedes ‘necessarily’, backwards, see Kastovsky 1992: 137),12 underwent further
changes, all of them associated with GE. Beside(s) was extended to mean ‘in addition’
(12), an example of Himmelmann’s semantic-pragmatic expansion:
(12) He deprived him of a portion of his kingdom, and assessed
he deprived him of a part of his kingdom, and assessed
hym to pay a great summe of mony besides.
him to pay a great sum of money in-addition
(1564 N. Haward tr. F. Eutropius, Briefe Chron. vi. 52 [OED])
12
The -s in an adverbial marker originates in the genitive inflection found on many adverbs in English,
e.g. backwards. The division of labour between preposition beside and pragmatic marker besides is a
relatively recent development.
In EModE the preposition beside(s) came to be used to introduce a finite that-

complement clause meaning ‘although’ (13). This use was largely restricted to the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the OED cites a nineteenth-century
example, and several appear in COHA including (13c) from the end of the
twentieth century:
(13) a. Sire besides that I am your Graces subject and servant
Sir although I am your Grace’s subject and servant
. . . your Grace hath also shewyd so largely your
. . . your Grace has also shown so generously your
bounteousnes and liberalite anenst me that . . .
bounty and liberality toward me that . . .
(1517 Tunstall, Letter [HC; Rissanen 2004: 165])
b. for beside that he died in charity with all, I
for although he died in poor-house nevertheless I
never heard that he once reflected on
never heard that he once said-anything-bad about
his prosecutors.
his prosecutors
(1763 Ordinary’s Account, OA17630824 [OBP])
c. What is so significant about Burle Marx's contribution—besides that it has
lasted 60 years—is the way it has made an impact on all scales. (1990 Parfit,
Smithsonian 21 [COHA])
In EModE beside(s) was also used as a clause-initial discourse particle meaning
‘furthermore, in addition to what was said before, but not central to the argument’:
(14) a. In terms of choice I am not solely led
By nice direction of a maiden’s eyes;
Besides, the lottery of my destiny
Bars me the right of voluntary choosing.
‘In terms of choice (of a husband) I am not led solely by the dainty guidance
of a maiden’s eyes; in addition, the lottery of my destiny bars me the right to
choose voluntarily’. (1600 Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice II.i.15 [LION:
Shakespeare])
b. and when he lookt for Money to pay his Reckoning, he miss'd his Money,
but could not be positive that she took it: and besides, several Persons who
were present, declared they did not see her touch him. (1698 Trial of Eleanor
Watson, t16980223-7 [OBP])
Use of the preposition as a subordinator as in (13) and of the adverb as a discourse
particle as in (14) are examples of syntactic expansion: the new uses have scope
syntactically as well as semantically over the whole clause. They are therefore
counterexamples to Lehmann’s scope reduction (parameter (d)). They are, however,
examples of Himmelmann’s syntactic and semantic-pragmatic expansions. In our
view, syntactic and semantic-pragmatic scope expansion follow from the discourse
function uses to which a construction like besides was recruited. This is also true of
the many other metatextual markers the history of which has been investigated, such
as in fact (Traugott and Dasher 2002), and of course (Lewis 2003).
In sum, practitioners of both the GR and GE perspectives view directionality as an
essential characteristic of grammaticalization, but differ as to whether or not it is
limited to traditional structural aspects of ‘core’ grammar, and on how sub-types of
Lehmann’s grammaticalization parameters are to be interpreted (in earlier work
often out of context). In the GR model, directionality is usually hypothesized to be
‘uni’-directionality. It is associated primarily with the semantic and signal reductions
that accompany changes known as lexical > grammatical, less abstract > more
abstract, less dependent > more dependent. For some practitioners of GR unidirec-
tionality is a key factor, so much so that Haspelmath (1999) suggested that the
unidirectionality of grammaticalization is ‘irreversible’. In the GE model, direction-
ality is primarily a hypothesis about expansion to more collocations and to more
syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic options; it answers the question how changes
affect use in contexts (and how contexts enable change).
The kinds of expansion that Himmelmann has identified and that are foundational
to a GE perspective on grammatical change are the kinds of changes that we find in
grammatical constructionalization. However, from the perspective of the GE model,
a problem for unidirectionality is that a particular instance of grammaticalization or
grammatical constructionalization typically does not expand indefinitely, despite Ki-
parsky’s (2012: 49) hypothesis that unidirectionality is exceptionless, given a principled
theory of analogy as optimization. In the ‘life-cycle’ of grammatical constructions, very
robust grammatical markers that have undergone expansions of various sorts may
become restricted and peripheral or may even disappear (see chapter 2.5.1). The
conclusion must be that expansion is characteristic of grammatical constructionaliza-
tion and of subsequent constructional changes, at least until such time as a new
competing construction comes into being, but not necessarily after that.
3.3 A constructional approach to directionality

As discussed in chapter 1.4.2, constructional approaches have sometimes conceptual-
ized change and directionality in terms of changes in schematicity, productivity, and
compositionality (including analyzability). For example, Trousdale (e.g. 2008a, 2010,
2012a) proposed that in grammatical constructionalization the first two increase, and
the third decreases. As will be discussed in chapter 4, it turns out that increase in
productivity and schematicity are characteristic of constructionalization in general,
not specifically of grammatical constructionalization, but there are differences in the

types of schematicity and productivity involved.
The three-way set of distinctions is more elaborate than has sometimes been made
in the construction grammar literature, where schematicity and compositionality
alone may be invoked. For example, Gisborne and Patten (2011: 96) and Langacker
(2011: 82) identify schematicity with loss of contentful meaning, i.e. increase in
abstractness, and what Langacker calls representations of ‘mental operations’, but
do not distinguish productivity. Gisborne and Patten (2011: 97) also identify host-
class expansion with increased schematicity and say that increasingly productive
constructions ‘sanction more instances’ (p. 98). Barðdal (2008) distinguishes prod-
uctivity and schematicity, while at the same time showing that they are closely
related. She correlates productivity with high type-construction frequency and high
degree of schematicity (i.e. complex schematic hierarchies), low productivity with
low type frequency and high degree of specificity (p. 172). While we also distinguish
productivity and schematicity, we do not do so in exactly the same way as Barðdal, in
part because we consider a wide set of grammatical developments, whereas she is
concerned with argument structure only, in part because we seek to develop an
approach that takes fuller account of context and Himmelmann’s (2004) three
expansion-types. In what follows we discuss changes in productivity as expansion
both of construction-types (type-frequency) and of constructs (token-frequency)
(3.3.1), and changes in schematicity as both shift toward procedural function and
changes in schemas and their makeup (3.3.2). In 3.3.3 we discuss decrease in compo-
sitionality as reduction of transparency in the link between meaning and form,
recognizing that analyzability may still persist in cases where compositionality
decreases. We go on to suggest how factors addressed in GR and GE approaches to
grammaticalization intertwine and therefore may be reconciled in a constructional
framework (3.3.4), and finally suggest possible reasons (‘motivations’) for direction-
ality in change (3.3.5). Our examples will be primarily from the development of the
binominal quantifiers and of BE going to ‘future’.
In our view the division of labour that we propose between increase in productivity
and in schematicity, together with decreased compositionality, provides a framework
that is conducive to unifying aspects of the GR and GE approaches to grammaticaliza-
tion. Briefly, GE approaches to grammaticalization are consistent with grammatical
constructionalization conceptualized as the development of procedural function
together with increase in productivity, collocational range, and schematicity. GR
approaches to grammaticalization are consistent with grammatical constructionaliza-
tion conceptualized as decrease in compositionality.
3.3.1 Increase in productivity

A typical statement in usage-based approaches to change is that ‘new constructions
come into being and spread by gradually increasing their frequency of use over time’
(Bybee and McClelland 2005: 387). In the grammaticalization literature, increase in

token frequency resulting from increase in type-frequency and collocational range
has been privileged (see e.g. Bybee 2003), in part because it explains reduction.
However, in construction grammar, type frequency receives particular attention, in
part because it accounts for expansion of resources available in a schema. For
example, Goldberg (1995) observes that the way-construction is a relatively low
token frequency item, but has a large number of collocates. She hypothesizes that
‘[t]his provides support for the idea that productivity has little to do with token
frequency and more with type frequency’ (1995: 137). While the issues of type and
token productivity are intertwined, they need to be kept apart, as Barðdal (2008)
emphasizes. For example, in considering the productivity of the development of
binominal expressions into quantifiers, we can address (a) expansion of the number
of micro-construction-types, e.g. the addition of a scrap of, a shred of to the inventory
or constructicon, (b) the nature of their collocates, and (c) how token frequently they
are used. As we will see in the next section, change in schematicity, for example, the
way the quantifiers are grouped into subschemas, is not necessarily directly correl-
ated with any of the dimensions of productivity mentioned here.
It has been customary in a tradition that goes back to classical times to think of
grammatical classes as closed or at any rate small. This view is, however, challenged
when grammaticality is thought of in terms of procedural function. The set of
quantifiers in English, for example, is relatively large. It includes not only the
traditional ones such as all, many, much, some, few, but also a little, and more
recently binominal ones like a lot of, a heap of, and a bit of. While the obviously
atomic, monomorphemic ones are older, the more complex ones are more recent,
and their structure, at least when they came into being, was consistent with the
increasingly periphrastic nature of English. Over time, with frequent token use they
have become reduced phonologically (see allota mentioned in chapter 1.5.3). Like-
wise, the ‘core’ modals make up a small set, but others have been and are continuing
to be added to the inventory over time (Krug 2000). Structurally the newer ‘quasi-
modals’ are consistent with periphrastic structure, among them BE going to, in some
varieties BE fixing to, and, showing evidence of a different adjectival structural source,
(had) better (Denison and Cort 2010). While the categories of quantifiers and
auxiliaries are relatively small, Hoffmann (2005) shows that the category of complex
prepositions (e.g. in front of, in terms of ) is quite large—well over a hundred, many of
them recent. In all cases, the grammatical categories are somewhat open-ended and
new construction-types can develop.
Because procedural constructions are relational and relatively abstract, they may,
over time, come to be used with a larger number of collocates. This is what
Himmelmann (2004) has called host-class expansion. Barðdal (2008: 31) considers
this to be the addition of a new type to the list of specific constructions (e.g. Vs, Ns) to
a schema, and evidence for the ‘extensibility’ of the schema. In most cases of
grammaticalization it has been noted that change starts in a relatively small corner of
the system and there is an increase in the distribution of the grammaticalizing item
over time, along a path that is minimally ‘obtrusive’ (De Smet 2012: 607). For
example, the BE going to future was initially used with activity verbs (make a
noose, read, lay out), like the motion with a purpose patterns were, and only later
was it extended to verbs increasingly less likely to be compatible with motion, e.g.
statives such as like, be. In the case of the binominal quantifiers a lot/lots of, they were
initially (in the eighteenth century) used mainly with concrete hosts like the original
partitives, but these typically referred to groups (people) (see (15a)) or were plural,
in other words, they were used in contexts that themselves implied quantity.
Examples of quantifier use with abstract mass collocates appear in the data only
in the nineteenth century, mainly in routine expressions like lots of room, or lots
of time (15b).
(15) a. There was a lot of people round him.
(1822 Trial of William Corbett et al., t18220911-157 [OBP])
b. The keeper will have lots of time to get round by the ford.
(1857 Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays [CL 2])
Abstract nouns appear more frequently after mid-nineteenth century in CLMETEV:
(16) a. He had battled with it like a man, and had lots of fine Utopian ideas about
the perfectibility of mankind.
(1857 Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays [CL 2])
b. she will not pester me with a lot of nonsensical cant.
(1885 Blind, Tarantella [CL 3])
c. He is only young, with a lot of power.
(1895 Meredith, The Amazing Marriage [CL 3])
Later still, it occurs with gerund nominals:
(17) the horses needed a lot of driving. (1901 Malet, The History of Sir Richard
Calmady [CL 3])
These type-expansion changes are post-constructionalization constructional
changes. We show in 3.3.2 below that type-construction productivity is related to
schematicity. With regard to token frequency, diachronic corpora show it can be very
variable, but by hypothesis it is motivated by the source meaning and distribution
and by the host-class collocates. An example is provided by Brems (2011: 207; 2012:
213) in her discussion of the growth of token frequency of heap(s) and lot(s) used in
NP of NP strings from 1100 through 1920. Synchronically she finds in the COBUILD
corpus the distribution of quantifier use of the same four size nouns in Figure 3.1
(with a subset of other size nouns included in Brems’s study):
bunches heap heaps load bunch loads lot/lots

| |
0% 34% 50% 67% 75% 88% 93% 100%
Figure 3.1 Quantifier use of some size nouns in COBUILD (based on Brems 2012: 211)
The synchronic percentages in Figure 3.1 show gradience and reflect differential
gradual diachronic changes. Important to notice here is that lot and lots are used as
quantifiers almost one hundred per cent of the time, but in the case of the other size
nouns there is a significant difference between singular and plural tokens regarding
quantifier use. In the case of bunch, the plural does not occur with the quantifier meaning
at all in COBUILD, whereas 88.4% of the uses of bunch are quantifier uses (e.g. bunch of
kids/lies). In the case of heaps, Brems (2012) hypothesizes that it originally meant
‘constellation, pile’ and unlike singular heap and the others did not have a partitive use.
3.3.2 Increase in schematicity13

In thinking about increase in schematicity two issues need to be kept apart. One is that
over time micro-constructions may become more schematic or abstract, as they partici-
pate in and become ‘better’ members of abstract schemas. The other is that schemas
themselves may expand, i.e. may come to have more members, as discussed in the
previous subsection and as was shown to be the case with the way-construction in chapter
2.7. Barðdal (2008: 31) refers to the integration of micro-constructions into a schema as the
‘extensibility’ of the schema. We briefly illustrate these two types of increase in schema-
ticity and then turn to the question of how productivity and schematicity interact.
As is well known in the grammaticalization literature, lexical items undergoing
grammaticalization are typically decategorized. Using our example of the develop-
ment of partitives into quantifiers, the partitive construction itself involves decate-
gorization of the measure noun. For example, lot and bit are used as a (pseudo)
partitive only when they are part of an indefinite NP and serve as the head of a
complex indefinite NP. The nouns lot and bit are decategorized because they are not
free to occur with the definite article. They are even further decategorized when they
are used as part of the quantifier construction because they are now used as modifier
and can no longer undergo inversion. For example, in (18), which is an early example
of bit used as head of a complex NP, bit is a free noun in its original contentful
meaning ‘bite’. It has not been decategorized:
(18) þis appyl a bete þerof þou take.
this apple a bite therof thou take
‘Take a bite of this apple’
(c1475 Ludus C [MED bite n.; Traugott 2008b: 29])
13
Parts of the discussion of the development of BE going to in this section draw on Traugott (Forthcoming).
Use of bit in a partitive is more schematic in the sense of abstract than it is as a free
noun. Its use in the quantifier construction is even more schematic because the
collocates of quantifiers are freer, and because quantification is scalar. Over time, as a
bit/lot of come to be more firmly entrenched as quantifiers they come to be used in
other scalar constructions, such as the degree modifier construction and can be used
as adverbs modifying adjectives (a bit/lot better). A detailed account of the develop-
ment of a bit/lot of as quantifiers and then degree modifiers would show that over
the last two centuries they were gradually assigned more prototypical features of the
schemas into which they have been recruited. In that sense they become subject to the
‘regularities’ of the schema (Barðdal 2008: 22). But as we saw in the previous section,
other size nouns like heap(s) that were recruited as quantifiers, are not as entrenched
(see Figure 3.1). Nevertheless, most have been subject to increased schematicity
(exceptions are bunches, and some others like piece which are used only as partitives,
not as quantifiers).
BE going to also provides an example of the increasing schematization of a micro-
construction. When it was first used in the early seventeenth century as a tense
marker, examples suggest that it meant relative tense ‘be about to’ (Garrett 2012).
This is discussed further in chapter 5.3.4. Here we consider the issue of when it was
constructionalized. In the data all but two examples that are plausibly temporal have
animate subjects prior to the eighteenth century, suggesting that expansion to the
new use was along a path of minimal difference (see De Smet 2012). The two
seventeenth-century examples with inanimate subjects, a distribution that was not
available for constructs expressing motion with a purpose, are:
(19) a. Bel. Where’s all his money?
Orl. ‘Tis put ouer by exchange: his doublet was going to be translated
(‘removed’), but for me. (1630 Thomas Dekker, The Honest Whore,
Part II [LION; Garrett 2012: 70])
b. You hear that there is money yet left, and it is going to be layd out in
Rattels . . . or some such like commodities. (1647 Field and Fletcher, The
Honest Man’s Fortune [LION; Garrett 2012: 70])
Both examples are early, suggesting that at this period a few speakers may have
partially aligned BE going to with the auxiliary schema. However, absence of further
such examples shows that use with inanimates was not conventionalized until the
early eighteenth century, when a number of new uses appear in the textual record.
Among them are:
(20) a. deposed . . . that he thought the whole Front of the House was going to fall
(1716 Trial of John Love et al., t17160906-2 [OBP])
b. I am afraid there is going to be such a calm among us, that . . . (1725
Odingsells, The Bath Unmask’d [LION: English Prose Drama])
(20a) is an example of raising. This syntactic context had been available for older
auxiliaries well before the time that BE going to was used as a temporal, as (21) shows:
(21) a. But there can be nothyng more conuenient than by litle and litle to trayne
and exercise them in spekyng of latyne.
‘But there can be nothing more appropriate than little by little training and
exercising them in speaking Latin’. (1531 Elyot, The Governor [HC ceeduc1a])
b. I truste there shal be no fawte fownd yn me.
I trust there shall be no fault found in me
‘I trust that there will be no fault found in me’. (b1553 Mowntayne, Auto-
biography [HC ceauto1])
Since constructionalization requires change in form as well as meaning, it appears
that BE going to was not constructionalized until the eighteenth century, when it was
used with inanimate subjects and in raising constructions such as (20). How
entrenched as an auxiliary it became can be seen from examples like (22) where it
collocates with the motion verb go:
(22) I never saw him after, till I was going to go out. (1759 Trial of Terence Shortney
et al., t17571207-40 [OBP])
As new construction-types (micro-constructions) such as a bit/lot of or BE going to
come into being and coexist with older ones, the schemas in which they participate
are expanded. In some cases speakers may generalize and abstract over the individual
types and develop schemas. We have seen this in the case of the development of the
way-construction. In chapter 2.7 we hypothesized that precursors of this construction
were constructs of the intransitive and transitive constructions. During the seven-
teenth century, however, it appears that an independent way-construction emerged
and over time subschemas developed. This is a case of a schema developing and
becoming more schematic over time in that it acquires substructures. The idea is that
once enough construction types represent a category that category can serve as an
abstract pattern that is an attractor for micro-construction types and may expand as a
consequence. It is ‘extensible’ (Barðdal 2008: 31) and therefore productive at the
schema level. This is an interpretation from a historical perspective of how ‘item-
specific knowledge’ can over time come to be linked to ‘generalized or schematic
knowledge’ about them (Goldberg 2006: 98).
In the remainder of this subsection, we discuss some of the ways in which increases
in productivity (see 3.3.1 above) are linked to increases in schematicity. Various
comments appear in the literature on both grammaticalization and historical con-
struction grammar that the same mechanisms are at work throughout expansion and
that increases in productivity are relatively smooth. For example, according to Bybee
(2010: 95) ‘the mechanism behind productivity is item-specific analogy’. This might
suggest that analogy is equally likely to occur with high and low type frequency
constructions. On the other hand Barðdal (2008) proposes that analogy as a mech-
anism of change (‘analogization’) is associated with low type frequency provided this
low type frequency is accompanied by semantic coherence and high token frequency.
This is because ‘[c]onstructions high in type frequency need not show a high degree
of semantic coherence in order to be productive, while constructions low in type
frequency must show a high degree of semantic coherence in order to be productive’
(p. 9). Individual constructions with high token frequency are likely to be entrenched,
and hence available as models. Barðdal treats low and high frequency as poles on a
productivity cline, as represented in Figure 3.2:
Type
Frequency
High Open Schema
Different Degrees
of Productivity
Analogy
Semantic
Coherence
Low High
Figure 3.2 The productivity cline (based on Barðdal 2008: 38, 172)
A representation such as Figure 3.2 suggests that even if the mechanisms behind
low and high productivity are not the same, nevertheless the transitions from low
to high productivity will be smooth. A similar impression can be derived from
the quotation at the beginning of 3.3.1: ‘new constructions come into being and
spread by gradually increasing their frequency of use over time’ (Bybee and
McClelland 2005: 387).
However, Petré (2012) argues that such smoothness is not always in evidence. He
suggests that sometimes attraction into an extant highly productive schema may be
discontinuous with earlier developments from the perspective of an idealized smooth
cline. His example is the development of OE becum- ‘become’ and especially weax-
‘grow, wax’ into copulas in early ME:
(23) a. þonne weaxeð hraðe feldes blostman.

then grow fast field.GEN flowers
‘then the flowers of the field grow quickly’.
(c925 Meters of Boethius A6 [DOEC; Petré 2012: 28])
b. For loue of vs his wonges waxeþ þunne.
For love of us his cheeks become lean
‘His cheeks become lean for the love of us’.
(c1325 Lytel wotyt (Hrl 2253) [MED thinne; Petré 2012: 28])
Petré says there was a sudden explosion of type-frequency after these verbs were
constructionalized as copulas, as in (23b). The ‘bumpy’ and sudden growth of weax-
in ME is not wholly unlike that of the way-construction once it was constructionalized
(see chapter 2.7.4), although the reasons for the lack of smoothness are very different. In
the case of becum- and weax-, Petré suggests they were attracted into an extant copula
construction. In the case of the way-construction, it became highly type-productive only
after it became an independent construction associated with a schema of its own.14
The network approach to change outlined in chapter 2 helps us to understand why
the trajectory of change (the ‘actualization’, see De Smet 2012) is not always smooth.
Networks consist not only of micro-construction nodes, but also of groupings of
nodes (schemas and subschemas with nodes within them). In constructionalization a
new node is created. Although the step may be small, nevertheless it is discontinuous.
If at the time of constructionalization a micro-construction is attracted into a schema
it may become a less marginal member and more prototypical member of that
schema, as did BE going to. Once this occurs, the micro-construction is subject to
the characteristics of the schema and use with a dramatically increased number of
new collocates is expected. We hypothesize that, whatever the path to an entrenched
schema, the result of schematization can be rapid expansion of the construction-
types and that therefore directionality of expansion will not always show a smooth
trajectory—in fact it is unlikely to do so; it is more likely in fact to show S-curve-like
expansion (see Denison 2003 for discussion of various types of S-curves). This is one
of several ways in which work on constructionalization is significantly different from
work on grammaticalization. In the latter the focus is usually on development in a
single dimension. In the former it is on development in two dimensions: specific
micro-constructions and schemas.
3.3.3 Decrease in compositionality

While grammatical constructionalization, at least in its early stages prior to any loss
of members, is characterized by increased productivity and schematicity, it is also
14
Another possibility for the bumpy nature of the development of weax- could be the paucity of texts in
the crucial period (Martin Hilpert p.c.).
characterized by decrease in compositionality. In historical construction grammar

terms, decrease in compositionality is decrease in the transparency of the match
between meaning of the parts and the form/syntax. Note that this does not suggest
that subparts of a schema will be totally unanalyzable. Furthermore, decrease in
compositionality typically arises when there is mismatch between the older morpho-
syntax and a newer meaning. At this point there has been no morphosyntactic
neoanalysis, although some routinizing of syntactic order may be incipient, but
there have been some pragmatic changes and possibly some semanticization and
an idiomatic expression has been created. When constructionalization occurs, over
time the mismatch may be ‘resolved’ as the new construction becomes aligned to a
schema. The new construction may become more analyzable (as a member of the
new schema), but is often non-compositional semantically.
In the case of the development of partitive a bit of or a lot of into a quantifier, the
lexical meaning originally matched the syntax. Bit and lot were heads of the syntactic
string [NP1 [of NP2]]. However, as quantifiers, they modify the second NP, so the
semantic structure is [Modifier N] (see chapter 1.5.1) At the point of semantic
neoanalysis, the micro-construction is internally non-compositional (i.e. an idiom-
atic phrase is created). The distinction emerges when considering the potential
mismatch between meaning and form, as in (24) (example (17) in chapter 1, repeated
for convenience):
(24) Mrs. Furnish at St. James’s has ordered Lots of Fans, and China, and India
Pictures to be set by for her, ‘till she can borrow Mony to pay for ‘em. (1708
Baker, Fine Lady Airs [LION: English Prose Drama])
Understood as a referring to ‘parcels’ of fans, lots is substantive and has compos-
itional lexical features. Understood as ‘many’ fans, lots does not have conventional
contentful lexical features of quantity and is less compositional semantically. From a
historical perspective the original partitive micro-construction underwent decrease
in compositionality when the new quantifier meaning was conventionalized (a
constructional change). When a lot of was constructionalized as a quantifier, how-
ever, a new, more abstract compositionality resulted and the mismatch was ‘resolved’
in the sense that both meaning and syntax now matched as modifier-head (a loss-
and-gain phenomenon). The morphosyntactic neoanalysis served to reestablish a
degree of ‘analyzability’ between the new micro-construction, and the grammatical
schema of which it has become a part, specifically between the micro-construction
lots of and the English quantifier schema. However, this new binominal quantifier is
idiomatic, and the meaning is not strictly derivable from the parts. Once established,
the new micro-construction became available for the language user to deploy in a
potentially wider range of contexts (the kinds of expansion we have discussed at
length earlier in this chapter), thus increasing its frequency of use.
Decrease in compositionality is gradient, as Hay (2001, 2002) and Bybee and

McClelland (2005: 393) show. Bybee and McClelland illustrate the gradience with
the degree of opacity of the historical prefix pre- in word-formation, as exemplified
by president, prediction, and predecease. It is most opaque in president, least in
predecease, and this difference in opacity is reflected in different stress assignment.
In the grammatical domain there are well-known differences in degree and rate of
coalescence and fusion (discussed in Bybee 2003, 2010 and elsewhere), depending
on the frequency of the combination or of the host that results from repetition and
routinization, e.g. I’m is more frequent than you’re and she’s, a phenomenon that
correlates with the frequency of the host pronouns. Loss of segments and of
morphological compositionality is likewise variable dependent on the frequency
of the host, so it is likely that the development of the French future from Latin
cantare habeo initially occurred with higher frequency verbs. Here there is initial loss
of the phrasal compositionality between dependent (V-infinitive) and head (habeo)
due to chunking, then neoanalysis resulting in the interpretation of -r- not as an
infinitive marker but as part of the future marker, and reduction of habeo to -ai,
resulting in a new, compositional -rai ‘1st person future’. As Lehmann (2002) notes,
crucially for grammaticalization, the verb itself was not neoanalyzed. This is captured
in grammatical constructionalization terms by reference to the exponents of the
original possessive/obligation structure being recruited to the schema [[Vi - Xj] $
[SEMi Futurej]].
Once entrenchment has occurred frequency of use may have an effect on form.
Repeated sequences tend to become phonologically more integrated and reduced
(see BE going to > BE gonna [ɡ@n@]). Among routines that are often greatly reduced
is I don’t know (see Bybee and Scheibman 1999, Bybee 2006 on reduction to > I dunno
[aId̪@no]). Pichler (2013) discusses how in conversational data collected in Berwick on
Tweed, in the far north-east of England, the negative clitic particle -n’t in don’t know
may either be reduced to [ʔ] or deleted altogether giving forms like [do?θIŋk],
[dʊθIŋk], and do may be reduced to [@] and occasionally, the initial fricative of
think is omitted altogether, resulting in forms like [doʔĩŋk] or [d@ʔIŋk]. Pichler says a
local variant, written I divn’t knaa, is expressed by tokens such as [dIvn̩nɜ̃:] or
[tIfn̩ˈnɐ].
Langacker (2011) regards grammatical elements as having secondary status, and
hence needing to be allocated fewer processing resources (see also Boye and
Harder 2012). This, in Langacker’s view, leads to reduction: ‘Reducing the alloca-
tion of time, attention, and bandwidth brings about not just the compressed
manifestation of semantic and phonological content but its actual erosion’
(2011: 83). Likewise, the cumulative effects of entrenchment help explain why
constructions generally (not only grammatical ones) show high degrees of fixation
(Goldberg 2006).
3.3.4 The interweaving of GR and GE factors in constructionalization

and constructional change
The discussion of expansion above and especially of the constructional increases in
productivity and schematicity, and in decreased compositionality associated with and
following on from grammatical constructionalization suggests that the approaches are
far from orthogonal. Rather, the factors considered intertwine in change.
Constructionalization is preceded by a series of small-step changes such as
increase in the salience of pragmatic inferences and routinization in certain contexts,
which may lead to chunking and eventually to mismatches between form and
meaning. These shifts may in turn lead to decrease in compositionality at the level
of the existing micro-construction. These are constructional changes that may feed
into the constructionalization of a new micro-construction, i.e. formnew-meaningnew
pairing. The resolution of a mismatch allows full sanction by the grammatical schema,
thus the new micro-construction is compositional with respect to its sanctioning
schema. However, relational links between elements of the micro-construction are
lost. Grammatical constructionalization is followed by increases in the type-productivity
of the new micro-construction. This in turn affects the productivity of the schema.
Typically the source construction continues to be used, even in the same contexts.
These kinds of changes in grammatical constructionalization are in many cases
‘the other side of the coin’ of the processes Lehmann identified from a GR perspective
(see Table 3.2) (recall that both Lehmann’s processes and the characteristics of the
constructional changes are gradient). The GR perspective focuses on what happens
internally within an item or group of items, while the GE perspective focuses on what
happens externally, especially on productivity. It turns the spotlight on changes in
their range (collocates), and in the degree of abstractness of the cluster or family of
items (schematicity). The points of contact are summarized in Table 3.3:
TABLE 3.3. Compatibility of the development of a new grammatical micro-

construction with Lehmann’s processes of grammaticalization*
Characteristics of the development of a grammatical Lehmann’s processes of
micro-construction grammaticalization
Mismatch, decrease in semantic compositionality Attrition of semantic features (a)

Initial chunking and routinization Fixation (f)
Attraction to set Paradigmaticization (b)
Decrease in internal formal compositionality Coalescence and attrition of
phonology (e, a)
Increased entrenchment Obligatorification (c)
*
The relevant parameter in Table 3.2 is cited after each process. Lehmann’s process ‘condensation’ (parameter
(d)) is not included for reasons discussed in section 3.2.1 above.
Table 3.3 strikingly shows that the reductions and expansions that we have called
GR and GE are interwoven. The first two characteristics (mismatch and chunking)
are largely associated with pre-grammatical constructionalization; the third (attrac-
tion to a set) is concomitant with grammatical constructionalization (if a relevant
set pre-exists), and the fourth and fifth (decrease in internal formal compositionality
and increased entrenchment) are largely associated with post-grammatical construc-
tionalization. In other words, some semantic attrition and loss of compositionality
and morphosyntactic fixing may precede the types of expansion associated with
constructionalization, while decrease of formal compositionality that is associated
with reduction of the signal and increased entrenchment that is associated with
obligatorification, follow after expansion.
Furthermore, the outcome of attrition of semantic features is the possibility for use
in a larger set of contexts, hence host-class expansion and syntactic expansion of the
type Himmelmann (2004) discussed.
3.3.5 Possible motivations for directionality of change

So far we have only hinted at the motivations or possible reasons for directionality in
change. In work on grammaticalization, especially among proponents of the GR view
of change, a question of primary interest has been why directionality toward procedural
function is far more common than in the reverse direction toward contentful function
(Börjars and Vincent 2011 summarizes a number of responses to this question). Initial
answers to this question appealed to the competing factors ‘be clear’ (to the addressee)
and ‘be quick’, a proposal that goes back at least to von der Gabelentz (1901) and that was
elaborated on especially in the late 1970s and the 1980s by Langacker (1977), Slobin
(1977), and Du Bois (1985). A problem with this proposal is that the two principles could
potentially cancel each other out and it does not account for the asymmetry between
change from lexical toward grammatical expression (frequently attested) and grammat-
ical toward lexical expressions (infrequently attested).
Haspelmath proposed that the asymmetry can be accounted for by speakers’ desire
to be different and ‘expressive’ (see also Lehmann 1985) or ‘extravagant’ (Haspelmath
1999). Haspelmath (1999: 1043) defines ‘extravagance’ as ‘speakers’ use of unusually
explicit formulations in order to attract attention’ and be socially successful (p. 1057).
This motivates use of a periphrasis over an older non-periphrastic expression. Haspel-
math goes on to suggest that the short-term advantage to the innovator of using a new,
more explicit expression disappears as the innovation is adopted by others and becomes
devalued through repetition and over-use. This repetition and overuse (what we call
token/construct frequency) account for the asymmetry is attractive in that it is designed
to show how the ‘macro-effect of grammaticalization’ arises out of ‘the speech behavior
of individuals at the micro-level’ (p. 1063). Speakers are envisaged as strategically
engaged, though not necessarily conscious of the choices they make—Haspelmath
draws on Keller’s (1994) position regarding the ‘invisible hand’ which posits that change
is the unintended byproduct of ordinary language use.
There are, however, problems with Haspelmath’s proposal. While a newly con-
structionalized procedural construction is clearly different from its source, and is an
addition to the inventory, it is not an obvious device for making oneself noticed or
even for being expressive. Consider the development of the way-construction dis-
cussed in 2.7. If the hypothesis is correct that a large number of constructs had been
available by the 1600s with way in them, but not requiring many of the characteristics
that crystallized in the construction [[SUBJi [VTRcausative POSSi way] (DIR)] $
[‘SEMi cause to traverse a path’]] hypothesized in chapter 2.7.3, the development of
this construction with causative verbs like make, take (which had been available
earlier) is hardly noticeable. The development of the new subschema with non-
causative accompanying action exemplified by use of plash or shoot might have
been more noticeable when this new subschema came into being, but this expansion
of the construction seems more like experimenting with ‘difference’ than with
‘extravagance’.
Admitting that use of the term ‘extravagant’ might itself be extravagant, Haspel-
math (2000: 796) says that:
The crucial point is that for my theory to work, extravagant expressions and their social
interpretation need not be striking—they merely need to be discernible, and there must be an
asymmetry (no ‘antiextravagant behavior’).
He does not, however, state what the optimal group of discerners might be. For
change to occur they must be discerners who would adopt the new expression.
Presumably they would be young adults who use language for purposes of social
identification and signaling their difference.15
The quotation from Haspelmath appears to presuppose that the change is in some
way a linguistic marker of which there is social awareness. This would make a change
more noticeable in the community than Keller’s invisible hand approach—that
Haspelmath draws on—might allow. Some changes certainly do receive attention
(and not only from purists), in other words, they are not only above the level of
awareness but they can also be the topic of metalinguistic comment. For example,
use of a lot of was criticized in the nineteenth century as too colloquial to be suitable
for written genres, and The American Heritage Dictionary, 2011, 5th ed., still says
quantifier a lot of is colloquial. Another example is the development at the end of the
eighteenth century of the progressive passive as in the house was being built (earlier
progressive passives were of the type the house was building). The progressive passive
was regarded as ‘unharmonious’, ‘clumsy’, ‘a philological coxcombry’, and ‘illogical,
15
It should be noted, however, that the sources in CLMETEV that illustrate the new subschema are
actually by older men, and both are letters. See examples (46a) and (46b) in chapter 2.7.4.
confusing, inaccurate, unidiomatic’ (White 1871: 334–363, cited by Mossé 1938: 157).
But many other changes do not evoke comment; for example, we are unaware of any
attention being drawn to the development of quantifiers like a bit of, a shred of.
A further problem with Haspelmath’s proposal is that it presupposes that gramma-
ticalization involves change from lexical to grammatical status (Haspelmath 1999:
1057). It is therefore not designed to account for grammaticalization with non- or
minimally lexical sources. More importantly, it relies heavily on the notion that new
expressions leading to grammaticalization are periphrastic (Haspelmath 2000), but
this is true only if periphrasis is a system-wide grammatical strategy in the language
of the time, as it was in the case of the development of the BE going to future.
Furthermore, it does not address the fact that only certain kinds of expressions are
likely to be used with procedural function—those that have appropriate semantics/
pragmatics, and are relatively content-less: ‘It is not just the fact of repetition that is
important, but in addition, what is repeated, that determines the universal paths’
(Bybee 2003: 622; italics original). We assume that the main reason for directionality,
whether expansion or reduction, is repetition. Repetition is also central for a new
node in a network acquiring unit status (i.e. becoming entrenched in the sense of
Langacker 1987).
Another likely motivation for directionality that has been proposed in the litera-
ture on grammaticalization is analogical thinking, the necessary process behind
analogization (see Bybee’s 2010: 95 comment already cited in section 3.3.2 above:
‘the mechanism behind productivity is item-specific analogy’). In earlier chapters,
especially 2.3.3 we distinguished two types of analogy: analogization (analogy as a
mechanism), and analogical thinking (analogy as a motivation). As Fischer (2007,
2010) argues, insufficient attention has been paid to analogical thinking in work on
grammaticalization. Given that grammatical constructionalization highlights pat-
terns of productivity and the changing role of schemas, exemplar based analogical
thinking must be privileged as a likely motivation for change. But to what extent it
should be constrained is not agreed on. Fischer appears to promote a relatively
unconstrained ‘loose fit’ approach. For example, she argues that BE going to was
analogized to the set of periphrastic auxiliaries that already existed at the time (early
seventeenth century). These were have to, be to, ought to, and, with low frequency,
need to and dare to. Since none had -ing and none meant ‘future’ the analogy is not
exact to either form or meaning. We suggested in chapter 2.3.3 that a deal of may have
been an exemplar for later binominal partitive > quantifier changes. Here again there
is no close match since a deal of favored the adjective great; however, since examples
without an adjective are attested and meaning is close, the fit here is relatively tight.
On the other pole of constraining analogical thinking is Brems’s (2011: 263–269)
proposal that a bit of was probably not the direct model for other small-size noun >
quantifier changes like a whiff/smidgen/scrap/jot/shred of, because it was associated
with neutral polarity in the nineteenth century, the period when a whiff/smidgen/
scrap/jot/shred of were becoming conventionalized as quantifiers. Unlike a bit of, a

whiff/smidgen of were associated with positive polarity and a scrap/shred/jot of with
negative polarity. The number of attestations in her data base is, however, very small,
so the conclusion is only tentative. Brems grants, however, that there may have been
indirect modeling. Specifically, she suggests that a bit of may have ‘exercised some
analogical pull’ along with more distant general small size quantifiers like few
(p. 266).
Discussion of analogical models is often couched in words like ‘exercise analogical
pull’ or ‘attractor set’ as if a construction rather than processes used by users of the
language motivate change. From a usage point of view such terms are best translated
as being shorthands for the intersection of analogical thinking and speakers’ prefer-
ence for a pattern that for some reason, presumably social, has become salient for a
group of speakers, perhaps because of frequency of repetition. Factors that appear
relevant are a ‘best fit’ model, conceptualized as a medium ground between Fischer’s
‘loose fit’ and Brems’s ‘tight fit’, and relative proximity in the network (see chapter 2).
3.4 Rethinking degrammaticalization in terms of constructionalization

An important question for any hypothesis is how testable it is and how robust its
predictions are. There has therefore been considerable discussion of whether there
are legitimate counterexamples to unidirectionality in grammaticalization as repre-
sented by the types of changes we have labeled GR, and if so, how frequently they
occur, and how to interpret them (see especially Campbell 2001, Norde 2009).16 Here
we discuss certain aspects of degrammaticalization that can be rethought in terms of
constructional change and constructionalization.
The type of counterexample to unidirectionality most frequently cited is ‘reversal’
of grammaticalization. While some strong claims were made in the late 1990s that
counterexamples to unidirectionality are not attested, or if they are, they are so rare
and marginal as not to be significant (e.g. Haspelmath 1999),17 evidence has been
growing that there are some (Haspelmath 2004, and especially Norde 2009), as might
be expected given that human language is subject to chance and manipulation for
various kinds of social purposes. All the counterexamples challenge the GR perspec-
tive of grammaticalization. Ramat (1992, 2001) proposed that up, ante, ism, and
16
Newmeyer (1998: 263) claimed that any counterexample ‘is sufficient to refute unidirectionality’. This
appears to assume that language operates on scientific laws like those of physics, rather than on those of
social interaction. In our view it is too restrictive a view of grammar, since language is a social phenom-
enon, and therefore subject to changes that are not always predictable.
17
In his account of constraint-based ‘spontaneous changes’, Kiparsky (2012) proposes that ‘gramma-
ticalization is strictly unidirectional’, as cited in section 3.2.3. He goes on to say: ‘in other words, . . . there is
no such thing as degrammaticalization’ (Kiparsky 2012: 37). Any attested instance of degrammaticalization
is, according to his hypothesis, a case of exemplar-based analogy, i.e. of an idiosyncratic, language-specific
change based on a model.
similar formations of verbs and nouns from grammatical and derivational mor-
phemes are counterexamples to grammaticalization, not only on grounds of a
perceived shift from grammatical to substantive (lexical) status, but also, especially
in the case of examples like ism, because of the shift from bound to non-bound status
(see also Janda 2001). Ramat considered such examples to be cases of degrammati-
calization that may result in lexicalization (we return to this issue in chapter 4).
In her book, Degrammaticalization, Norde (2009) uses Lehmann’s parameters
in Table 3.2 to assess putative examples of degrammaticalization and argues that
degrammaticalization is best viewed as a cluster of phenomena:
Degrammaticalization is a composite change whereby a gram in a specific context gains in
autonomy or substance on more than one linguistic level (semantics, morphology, syntax, or
phonology). (Norde 2009: 120)
Genuine changes of the type discussed under the rubric of degrammaticalization often
lack one important characteristic of grammaticalization (and constructionalization):
they tend to involve one change, not a series of changes, and to be isolated: they do not
participate in sets of similar changes or serve as models for additional changes.
Norde distinguishes several types of degrammaticalization: of these deinflectiona-
lization and debonding are of direct relevance to grammatical constructionalization.
They will be discussed in turn.
3.4.1 Deinflectionalization
Deinflectionalization is the reversal of ‘secondary grammaticalization’ (the shift from
an already grammaticalized element to a more grammatical one, Givón 1991: 305). It
is typically the reversal of a shift from inflection to clitic, which means that the
degrammaticalizing morpheme remains bound and continues to have grammatical
functions. These may, however, not be as semantically abstract as they were when
associated with the inflection it once was. Deinflectionalization is deparadigmatization
in Lehmann’s terms, i.e. morphological patterns in a particular slot are dismantled in a
reversal of the expected outcomes of Lehmann’s parameters (b) and (f) (see section 3.2.1).
One of the most cited examples is the shift in English and Continental Scandi-
navian from the genitive singular suffix -s into a clitic possessive attached to a full
NP. Although these developments have several similarities, they are nevertheless
different in detail (see e.g. Norde 2002, 2006).18 In English an originally masculine
and neuter genitive inflection associated in OE with a subclass of nominals, -s is
usually thought to have been neoanalyzed as a modifier of a full NP and as a
determiner. This is an instance of enrichment of grammatical function. Even though
this change is usually referred to with reference to -s genitive, it is in fact an example
18
Andersen (2008: 21) includes this development under ‘regrammations’.
of a type change (inflection > clitic), not of token reversal because -s was not used
with all nouns as a class until the clitic arose.
An example of genitive inflection from OE is:
(25) Eanflæd Edwines dohtor cinges
Eanflæd Edwin.GEN daughter king.GEN
‘Eanflæd King Edwin’s daughter’ (Chron C 626.1 [DOEC])
Here there is internal agreement. By ME internal NP agreement had been lost, and
of came to replace -s in many instances, as indicated by the free translation of (25).
-s was, however, retained to mark an animate possessive as in:
(26) Hii clupede edwyne þe kinges sone of norþhomberlond.
They called Edwin the king.GEN son of Northumberland
‘They called Edwin, the King of Northumberland’s son’.
(c1325(c1300) Glo.Chron.A (Clg A.11 [MED southlond]))
During the seventeenth century it came to be used externally to an NP in what is
called the ‘group genitive’, and it is now possible even to use it at the right edge of an
NP modified by a relative clause (usually with zero relativizer or a free relative),19 e.g.:
(27) The student we were talking about's assignment is now late. (2010 Endley,
Linguistic Perspectives on English Grammar [Google; accessed Feb. 2nd 2012])
Given that morphological case was lost in English, the complete loss of -s might have
been expected. Its reuse as a clitic is therefore remarkable. It could be considered to be
an instance of what Lass (1990, 1997) has called ‘exaptation’ and Greenberg (1991)
‘regrammaticalization’: the reuse of an obsolescing grammatical form with a more
functionally useful one. The reasons for the deinflectionalization of -s in both English
and Continental Scandinavian are highly debated, but Norde (2002) and Kiparsky
(2012) hypothesize that this kind of change is associated with a major systemic change,
in this instance loss of case and especially loss of agreement within the NP.
While this example is widely cited, Börjars and Vincent (2011: 167) argue that the
one-dimensional inflection > clitic analysis is wrongly framed. When it is investi-
gated in more granular detail, it is less obviously a case of degrammaticalization. The
changes they identify are:
(a) Reduction of the case paradigm to one member with one form -s,
(b) NP-internal agreement to NP external agreement, resulting in once-only marking,
(c) Reduction in degree of bondedness,
(d) Head marking to right edge marking (i.e. uses of the group genitive, where the
item at the right edge is not the head of the NP).
19
For changes in the function and distribution of the English -s clitic, see Rosenbach (2002, 2010).
They note that (d) tends to be avoided in speech if the right edge is not the head. In
other words, expressions such as (27) above are infrequent in contemporary corpora.
Denison, Scott, and Börjars (2010) suggest that, based on distributional evidence, the
-s may still in fact have many of the properties of an inflection in PDE speech (if so, it
has persisted from OE times on). In conversation as represented in BNC, split
constructions of the type in (28) are preferred over ones with a clitic at the right
edge of the relative as in (27), and are reminiscent of ME and EModE constructs:
(28) We don’t know the gentleman’s name with the tape recorder (BNC FM7 8
[Denison, Scott, and Börjars 2010: 548])
Furthermore, examples like (29), which are reminiscent of OE (25) occur occasionally
in PDE speech:
(29) Because he wastes everybody’s else’s time (BNC KGB 54 [Denison, Scott, and
Börjars 2010: 555])
Adopting a constructionalist point of view, Trousdale and Norde (2013) assume
the rise of the English -s genitive clitic (at least in written language) is a case of
deinflectionalization, and argue that it can be said to have become more general in
three ways: First, it can now be used with any noun (see Börjars and Vincent’s (a)
above). Second, it ceased to be governed by verbs, prepositions or adjectives (e.g.
brucan ‘to enjoy’, which governs a genitive object). A third and more important
reason why the genitive construction can be said to have become increasingly general
is the emergence of the determiner function. Over time, as determiners came into
being in English (see e.g. Denison 2006; Davidse, Breban, and Van linden 2008), the
-s genitive came to be associated with the highly abstract and schematic ‘primary
determiner’ slot (the slot occupied by the articles and demonstratives, cf. the/that hat,
the man’s hat, John’s hat). The primary Determiner construction has an identifying
function. In ModE it occurs in a slot following predeterminers all, quite, exactly, but
preceding postdeterminers, such as several, different, and same (cf. all the/those
different ideas). As a primary determiner, the genitive is sanctioned by the macro-
level determiner construction. From a constructional perspective, the rise of the
determiner construction in English (and Swedish) involves gradual decategorializa-
tion of a range of different elements which begin to converge and to be recategor-
ialized around a core ‘grammatical’ property of nominal grounding (negotiation
between speaker and hearer regarding the referent of the nominal), affecting e.g.
numerals (OE an ‘one’ > PDE a(n) ‘indefinite article’), and demonstratives (e.g. OE
þæt ‘that’). In Swedish definite NPs require the definite (‘weak’) form of the adjective,
a formal property that makes the determiner construction more coherent in Swedish
than it is in English (Norde 2009). The -s genitive, which is a case of degrammaticaliza-
tion in the GR approach may therefore be recast as grammatical constructionalization.
It is formnew-meaningnew and there is increase in productivity and schematicity.
Trousdale and Norde (2013) propose that, in Langacker’s (2005) terms, as various
diverse members joined the macro-determiner construction, the latter itself has
undergone constructionalization. The determiner construction is now quite hetero-
geneous, and has become increasingly so every time a new micro-construction has
been added, and is therefore highly schematic. In ModE there have been adjective >
determiner shifts resulting in new quantifiers (e.g. certain, various) or deictic uses
(e.g. old as in my old job = ‘former job’) (see e.g. Breban 2010, Van de Velde 2011).
What makes determiner construction roughly coherent (and identifiable as a con-
struction) in English is the functional property of grounding the nominal and the
formal property of appearing before the nominal. Most Swedish determiners precede
their head as well, with the crucial exception of the suffix of definiteness (as in e.g.
kungen ‘the king’, barnet ‘the child’).20
Nevertheless, as Trousdale and Norde (2013) argue, the rise of the -s genitive is not
a prototypical case of grammatical constructionalization on the micro-constructional
level as there is an increase in compositionality because there is a decrease in
bondedness. This is in fact increase in analyzability (see chapter 1.4). When the
genitive was still a fusional case suffix, it could not be separated from its nominal or
adjectival stem. Moreover it had a phonological impact on the stem: in English,
voiceless fricatives became voiced before genitive -es; in Swedish, long vowels were
shortened and voiced consonants devoiced before genitive -s (Norde 2009: 168). In
those cases, the genitive and its stem were inseparable, and hence the meaning of the
whole could only with difficulty be derived from the meaning of the parts. In present-
day Swedish and English however, the NP and the enclitically attached genitive are
identifiable as two different entities, both morphologically and phonologically.
An increase in compositionality on the micro-level is perhaps most evident in
Swedish, where GEN can be attached to nouns of any number or gender, and as
group genitives become increasingly common, compositionality on this level may be
expected to continue to expand.
3.4.2 Debonding
Debonding also involves a shift away from affixes to less grammatical forms, but in
this case into free morphemes, not clitics. An often-cited example is the development
of the affirmative particle ep ‘yes’ in Estonian which earlier was an emphatic clitic. As
a result of phonological changes this clitic was reinterpreted as an independent
particle (Campbell 1991: 291). Other examples are the shift from the first person
plural verbal suffix -muid into a free pronoun ‘we’ in Connemara Irish (Doyle 2002)
and the decliticization of the Norwegian infinitival marker å (Faarlund 2007).
20
Note that Swedish has double definiteness when the noun is preceded by an adjective: det söta barnet
‘the sweet child’.
The debondings are, like grammaticalizations, gradual in the sense that they
develop in small steps and in specific contexts. But unlike grammaticalizations, and
grammatical constructionalizations, nearly all involve only one, not multiple, steps in
the gaining of autonomy or substance by a grammatical item or construction. There
are, however, some exceptions. For example, in the Finno-Ugric language Saami the
case suffix haga ‘abessive case’ came to be used as a postposition (Nevis 1986). This is
an instance of deinflectionalization, but in the Northern dialect the postposition has
in a second step come to be used as a free adverb, an instance of debonding.
With respect to debonding, the history of Irish muid is debated (see Norde 2009:
chapter 6.6), but one plausible account is that of Doyle (2002). He argues that in Early
Modern Irish the synthetic -maid (future first person plural) was prosodically similar
to the analytic form of verb inflection, and was neoanalyzed as an independent
pronoun muid21 in future paradigms in conjunction with the obligatorification
of subject pronouns and a general shift toward cliticization of earlier inflections.
Muid was then generalized to other verbal paradigms and eventually replaced the
earlier analytic first person plural pronoun sinn. From a constructional point of
view, at one stage -muid instantiated two constructions (future tense and first person
plural). The later free pronoun is different in form and syntactic distribution, but
not meaning. If so, the debonding change is a morphological, constructional one.
It is not, however, an instance of constructionalization, which requires both form
and meaning change.
3.4.3 A caution against projecting original uses from the present 22

The facts that there are some counterexamples to reduction and increased depend-
ency and that particular paths of expansion cannot be predicted, as discussed
immediately above, should serve as a cautionary note regarding several kinds of
assumptions that appear in the grammaticalization and constructional literature
concerning what one can deduce from synchronic variation. One assumption is
that variation is dynamic and typically shows ongoing grammaticalization. However,
as Pichler and Levey (2011) emphasize, using data on extenders like and that, or
something from north-east England, variation may be stable and may not always
reflect dynamic structural change or a continuum of grammaticalization as suggested
by Cheshire (2007), among many others, for extenders (but in different dialects of
English).23 A second, and related, assumption that sometimes appears in the litera-
ture is that synchronic variability is a direct result of grammaticalization. This
assumption is often based on Bybee, Pagliuca, and Perkins’ (1991) findings that the
21
Norde (2009: 204, ft. 24) notes that Doyle finds no morphological significance in the spelling
difference.
22
Parts of this section are based on Trousdale (2012b).
23
They do, however, find instability in social variables.
most token frequent and most bonded future grams are the oldest, and their
hypothesis that earlier history can be reconstructed by looking at token frequency
and degree of bonding. More radically, it is sometimes assumed that evolution of
language can be reconstructed on principles of GR (Heine and Kuteva 2007).
A related assumption in the construction grammar literature is that the most
frequently used, most entrenched construction is the oldest. For example, Langacker
(2008: 226) hypothesizes that ‘the most entrenched and most readily activated unit
will generally be the original structure, which can then be recognized as the category
prototype’. In a similar vein Jurafsky (1996: 572) proposes that synchronic radial
categories may be constructed by the linguist to represent ‘the archaeology of a
morpheme’s meaning, modeling the historical relations that may act as associative
links’. While it may often be the case that synchronic centers reflect earlier meanings,
the assumptions here must be taken with caution. Both Langacker (2008) and Jurafsky
(1996) are concerned primarily with meaning rather than with form-meaning pairings.
Since configurations of sets change, and since meaning and form typically do not
change at the same time, one cannot assume a necessarily close relationship between a
highly entrenched unit at a particular moment in time and its original structure. Such a
relationship needs to be posited as a hypothesis to be tested in each case.
Consider the history of what with, which semantically expresses reason, and
syntactically is an absolute adjunct. It is therefore semantically and syntactically on
the grammatical end of the continuum. Pragmatically it is evaluative, often negative.
In COCA it introduces non-finite clauses with gerunds (30a, b), and occasionally
with past participles (30c). It may also introduce coordinated NPs (30a, b).
(30) a. What with the boyfriend coming back and all the confusion of the para-
medics and neighbours, they couldn’t find anything (2003 Becker, Great
American [COCA])
b. At first, Uncle Martin hemmed and hawed. Finally, he said that, what with
him still missing Aunt Nonny so much and Grace so far away, the only
thing that could really make him feel better was . . . (2003 Trobaugh, Good
Housekeeping [COCA])
c. Winnie was easy to see, what with the cars all gone. What with her standing
in the middle of the new white concrete, looking betrayed. (2002 Reed, The
Sleeping Woman [COCA])
Gerunds are the most frequent collocates of what with in COCA, usually with
different logical subjects, as in (30a).
Assuming that the different structures arise historically at different times, on a GR
approach in which complex clauses are expected to be reduced and their organization
tightened, one might assume that the original construction was a gerund like (30a)
with different subject clauses, or a participle type (these usually have different
subjects), and that same subject clauses developed later with coordinated NPs last.
This is because non-finite and matrix clauses with same (controlled) subjects are
considered to have a ‘stronger syntactic bond’ (Kortmann 1991: 5) than is the case
where the matrix and the non-finite clauses have different subjects. However, the
history of the construction is very different (Trousdale 2012b). Trousdale shows that
the NP + NP construction is the earliest, being attested at the very beginning of the
ME period. Initially several prepositions can be found following what, including for
and through as well as with. However, what with came to be the favored expression.
This is a case of specialization (Hopper 1991) and an example of Lehmann’s param-
eter c), reduction of paradigmatic variability,24 as in (31):
(31) So what with hepe and what with crok,
so what with pruning hook and what with crook
Thei make her maister ofte wine.
They make their master often win
‘So by hook or by crook, they make it so their master often wins’. (c1393 Gower,
Confessio Amantis, 5.2872 [MED])
A few examples with gerunds appear in the eighteenth century in CLMETEV. Most
have no overt subject but the implied subject is the same as that of the main clause,
as in (32):
(32) The corporal had already, – what with cutting off the ends of my uncle Toby's
spouts – hacking and chiseling up the sides of his leaden gutters, – melting down
his pewter shaving-bason, – and going at last, like Lewis the Fourteenth, on to
the top of the church, for spare ends, &c. – he had that very campaign brought
no less than eight new battering cannons, besides three demi-culverins, into
the field. (1759–67 Sterne, Tristram Shandy [CL 1])
The only example of different subject in all three parts of the CLMETEV corpus
without an overt subject following what with is (33a) from the same text as (32). The
structure in (33a) might be an early experiment with different subjects, or might
result from priming by the series of what phrases that precede it. All other examples
of different subjects have either a possessor (logical subject) modifying the gerund
(33b) or a non-modified noun phrase rather than a gerund (3c). Whether or not the
subject is co-referential, throughout the eighteenth century what with constructions
involve coordination, sometimes without repeated what with (33b).
24
Like many largely fixed expressions it can be used in PDE with an intervening adverb, e.g. what
especially with, what all with (cf. in fact and in actual fact, anyway and any which way); others allow
nothing (beside, indeed). This has to do with degree of coalescence that has taken place. As anyway shows,
spelling as one word is not a reliable cue to these differences.
(33) a. Chaste stars! what biting and scratching, and what a racket and a clatter we
should make, what with breaking of heads, rapping of knuckles, and hitting
of sore places—there would be no such thing as living for us. (1759–67
Sterne, Tristram Shandy [CL 1])
b. but what with the Squire's drinking and swearing, and the young gentleman's
extravagance, and her daughter's pride and quarrelling, she is almost tired out
of her life. (1783 Kilner, Life and Perambulations of a Mouse [CL 2])
c. I assure you, what with the load of business, and what with that business
being new to me, I could scarcely have commanded ten minutes to have
spoken to you. (1780–96 Burns, Letters [CL 2])
No examples with past participle were found in CLMETEV, which suggests they are a
recent development.
In the later part of the nineteenth century the construction began to be expanded.
Uses of gerunds with nominals expressing different subject begin to appear as in (34).
(34) a. when she heard from my aunt how the poor things lived in uncleanness and
filth, and how, what with many being strangers coming by sea, and others
being serfs fled from home, they were a nameless, masterless sort, . . . she
devised a fresh foundation to be added to the hospital. (1870 Yonge, The
Caged Lion [CL 3])
b. he always was an ingenious fellow, and what with Rosy helping him with his
plans and figures, and so on, he got an extra good idea of mechanics. (1857
Cummins, Mabel Vaughan [COHA])
These are constructional changes since there is no change of meaning. Later
examples from COHA show a further constructional change, the development in
the twentieth century of pronominal logical subjects in verbal gerunds (him in (35);
also in (30b), and her in (30c) above):
(35) I’ve always thought, what with him fussing about ‘grammar,’ and ‘truth,’ he’d
be a hard man to live with. (1922 Deland, The Vehement Flame [COHA])
In sum, the history of the what with construction has been one of gradual expan-
sion after the initial stage of restriction to with. The expansion is first from what with
NP + NP > what with XP + XP (where XP covers both NP and gerunds), and finally
to what with XP (XP). It appears that the presence of an overt subject has increased
over time (Trousdale 2012b). The history is a case of host-class and syntactic expan-
sion from bare nominals to gerunds, and loosening of syntactic constraints as the
coordination pattern becomes optional. The current prevalence of what with con-
structions with different-subject gerunds is a late development and does not reflect
the original structure.
3.5 A case study: the development of ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts

As indicated in 3.2. although grammaticalization is usually thought of in terms of
lexical > grammatical change, in his foundational article Meillet (1958[1912]) referred
to grammaticalization of non-lexical elements. Interest in grammaticalization with-
out lexical sources has been high recently. One line of work is Diessel’s (e.g. 1999,
2012) research pointing out that lexical sources for demonstratives are difficult if not
impossible to find; demonstratives may have arisen independently and may in fact
need to be categorized separately from lexical and grammatical items. Another is
Lehmann’s (2008) discussion of the interface between information structure and
syntax, with focus on contrastive topic and focus. Another line of research is
represented by Norgård-S!rensen, Heltoft, and Sch!sler’s (2011) suggestion that
word order patterns are equivalent to morphological systems (p. 43) and interact
with (in our terminology are networked with) illocutionary frames, modality, and
textual cohesion (p. 230). Other works that highlight ways in which changes in
discourse organization interact with and may affect syntactic structures include
Hinterhölzl and Petrova (2009) and Meurman-Solin, López-Couso, and Los (2012).
Our purpose in this section is to illustrate aspects of grammatical constructionaliza-
tion discussed earlier in this chapter with the extended example of the development of
two information-structuring micro-constructions: ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts
(the latter are usually known as WHAT-clefts).25 They are subtypes of what Patten
(2010, 2012) characterizes in PDE as a larger family of construction-types including IT-
clefts and TH-clefts with forms like The thing/the one that V BE X. Here we sketch the
development of pseudo-clefts like: All/What I did/said was X, All that/What happened
was X, with particular attention to ALL- and WHAT-clefts with do (see Traugott
2008c, 2010b on which the following case study is based).
Traditional analyses of pseudo-clefts consider that the chief function of pseudo-clefts
is information-structuring (specifically focus-marking). Several key characteristics in
Modern English are identified including (see Prince 1978, Higgins 1979, Collins 1991,
Lambrecht 2001, Ward, Birner, and Huddleston 2002, among many others):
(a) Two clauses, one of which is a relative; the relative may be fused (cf. What I did
was party), or reduced (cf. All I did was party).
(b) Some part of the construction (typically the relative) is given or at least
recoverable.
(c) The focus constituent (X following the copula) is construed as an exhaustive,
exclusive listing.
25
We do not attempt to provide a full account of the development of pseudo-clefts. For example, we do
not discuss the development of TH-clefts, and because they do not involve do, we exclude ‘reverse clefts’ of
the type A red wool sweater is what I bought (Ward, Birner, and Huddleston 2002: 1414).
(d) Do refers to the same event as V in X (i.e. do is a pro-V, cf. What she did was
leave), therefore temporality matches across clauses.
(e) ALL-clefts are evaluative; they signal that the speaker/writer regards the focus
as less than adequate; all 6¼ ‘everything’ and is replaceable by only.
Although TH-clefts differ from other pseudo-clefts in having definite (pro)nouns
like the thing/the one in subject position, many researchers have assumed that
pseudo-clefts form a category: WHAT-clefts, TH-clefts, and, if discussed at all,
ALL-clefts. The argument is usually based on the assumption that pseudo-clefts
have non-cleft equivalents, from which they are derived. For example, (36b) is
thought to be derived from (36a):
(36) a. I went to the river.
b. All (that) I did was (to) go to the river.
Allerton (1991) argues that WHAT-pseudo-clefts are characteristic of what he calls
the ‘more precise’ way that spoken English is structured in comparison with written
language. He suggests that in spoken English do in WHAT-clefts focuses the verb in
X (37a), whereas other verbs focus NP in X (37b). His examples include (Allerton
1991: 475):
(37) a. What John did a few days later was readvertise. (clefted version of John
readvertised a few days later.)
b. What I’d like is a pint of beer. (clefted version of I’d like a pint of beer.)
A derivational analysis assuming that the simple sentence is the base is not
consistent with a non-derivational constructional perspective. Nor is it consistent
with Lehmann’s (2008) argument that contrastive clefts historically precede simple
topic-comment clauses. Patten (2012) reviews various earlier approaches to clefts
generally, and IT-clefts in particular, and develops a constructional perspective on
clefts positing a non-derived specificational construction with several sub-types.
Specificational meaning involves interpreting the copula relation as ‘listing the mem-
bership of a set rather than attributing a property to a referent’ (Patten 2012: 57).
She points out that definite NPs are ‘especially well-suited to enabling a specifica-
tional interpretation’, since the referring expression ‘is understood to provide a
complete, exhaustive list of the members which constitute the restricted set’ (Patten
2012: 57). She also argues that despite the fact that pseudo-clefts are members of the
specificational schema, nevertheless they do not form a unified category or sub-
schema. Rather, they are individual construction-types within the larger schema of
specificational constructions. The similarities follow from their being specificational
construction types.
According to Patten (2012), IT-clefts arose in OE.26 Structurally, they originally

focused NPs (38a). Various structural changes have led to the partial alignment
of IT-clefts to pseudo-clefts; by ME they could focus adverbial phrases (38b) and,
more importantly, in Modern English they have been used to focus clauses as
in (38c):
(38) a. þa cwædon þa geleafullan, ‘Nis hit na Petrus
then said the faithful, NEG-is it NEG Peter
þæt þær cnucað, ac is his ængel’.
REL there knocks but is his angel
‘then said the faithful, “it is not Peter who knocks there, but his angel” ’.
(Ælfric, Catholic Homilies, I.34: 474 [Patten 2012: 172, citing Ball 1991: 39])
b. Me troweþ þat by þe prayers of þis holy mayde
Me believes that by the prayers of this holy maid
it is þat þat place was never ʒit destroyed.
it is that that place was never yet destroyed
‘I think that it was by the prayers of this holy maiden that that place was
never destroyed till now’. (a1387 John of Trevisa, Polychronicon [Patten 2012:
197]).
c. It is because high or low wages and profit must be paid, in order to bring a
particular commodity to market, that its price is high or low. (1766 Smith,
Wealth of Nations [CL 1])
Likewise there has been partial alignment of ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts to IT-
clefts since they can now readily focus NPs as well as clauses (Traugott 2008c, Patten
2012).
Pseudo-clefts arose in the sixteenth century, first TH-clefts and ALL-clefts, both of
which appear around 1600, and a couple of generations later WHAT-clefts. Both
occur in contesting discourse environments and implicate counteractive stance (see
chapter 5.3.6). Initially V in ALL- and WHAT-clefts is almost exclusively say or do
‘act’ (main verb). Do is attested in several LION: EEBO texts, and extensively in
CLMETEV where it is favored in represented conversation or reports of what was
said and in letters. Surprisingly, however, it does not occur in OBP, despite the
context of trials in which what someone did is of crucial importance. In OBP the V in
pseudo-clefts is a verb of locution.
We discuss precursors of ALL and WHAT-clefts in 3.5.1, early development of
constructionalized pseudo-clefts in 3.5.2, and later developments in 3.5.3. In 3.5.4 we
26
This analysis contrasts with that of Ball (1994), who argues that the IT-cleft arose in ME.
discuss what evidence pseudo-clefts provide for some of the hypotheses developed in
the frameworks of grammaticalization and constructionalization.
3.5.1 Precursors of ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts

Sixteenth-century texts suggest that a rich range of biclausal constructs were pro-
duced by speakers with features that might have enabled new links to be made in the
network that led to the growth of the pseudo-clefts. At this period there was a
construction that was pragmatically specificational: the IT-cleft, which had already
long been in existence (see (38a) above). Because it was used to focus only NP or PP
(38b), it does not have the same form as the later pseudo-clefts and appears not to
have been a direct model. A new TH-cleft was coming into existence. Then, as now,
TH- could be the pronoun that, or the thing.27 This construction too was specifica-
tional, but again the form is different from the pseudo-clefts. Most importantly, the
TH-element could be the subject as in (39), whereas, as we will show, ALL and WHAT
are objects until the nineteenth century. Also, X could be a nominal, as in (39a).
(39) a. Here stands my son, a banish’d man,
And here my brother, weeping at my woes.
But that which gives my soul the greatest spurn
Is dear Lavinia, dearer than my soul.
(1594 Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus III.1.99 [LION: Shakespeare])
b. The thing which doth amate, and most anoy my mind,
The thing that dismays and most troubles my mind
Is that my hard estate, no remedy can finde.
is that my difficult condition no remedy can find
(1580 Gifford, A Posie of Gilloflowers [LION: EEBO])
However, the existence of specificational clefts no doubt enabled some analogical
thinking.
Before the emergence of pseudo-clefts there were also left-dislocations. This kind
of structure was used fairly extensively in ME, but was in decline during the EModE
period (Pérez-Guerra and Tizón-Couto 2009). Left-dislocations could occur with any
verb, but those with BE have some structural surface similarity to pseudo-clefts:
(40) a. What that he did or seid it was to geue us good ensamples.
What REL he did or said it was to give us good examples
(c1470 Bible F. [MED])
27
THAT-clefts may, however, be related to demonstrative that-clefts, which contain extraposed relative
clauses (That’s Susan on the phone) (Patten, p.c.). In that case they are members of a different construction.
b. Last of all, that that differs from any thing, that

Last of all, that which differs from any thing, that
cannot be the same that is not hit.
cannot be the same that is not it.
‘Last of all, what differs from something cannot be the same as that thing’.
(1593 Queen Elizabeth, Boethius [HC ceboeth2])
However, left dislocations cannot be direct sources because there is a resumptive
pronoun, and they are not specificational. Likewise examples such as those in (41)
cannot be direct sources since the predicate in X is indefinite and descriptive (41a), an
adjective (41b), or an adverb (41c), and therefore not specificational.
(41) a. That which they outwardly did, was a token of their mind, and a fruite of
their faith. (1600 Abbott, Exposition [LION: EEBO])
b. Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon. (1600 Shakespeare, Henry V, IV.i.320 [LION: Shakespeare])
c. since that all what I am is in thy sight, I onelie say, that . . .
(Ainsworth, Henry, 1571–1622? An epistle sent vnto tuuo daughters of VVar-
wick [LION: EEBO])
There are also some examples which appear to have the form of pseudo-clefts.
However, in the case of complex clauses with do followed by to, do is a main verb
meaning ‘perform’ followed by a purposive clause in X (42), and in the case of ALL-
expressions (42a), ALL means ‘everything’:
(42) a. I loue thee dearer then I doe my life,
And all I did, was to aduance thy state,
To sunne bright beames of shining happinesse.
(1601 Yarrington, Two Lamentable Tragedies [LION: EEBO])
b. Shal. Will you, upon good dowry, marry her?
Slen. I will do a greater thing than that, upon your request, cousin, in any
reason.
Shal. Nay, conceive [‘understand’] me, conceive me, sweet coz. What I do is
to pleasure [‘please’] you, coz. Can you love the maid?
(?1597 Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor I.i.250 [LION: Shakespeare])
In sum, of the constructs discussed in this section, only IT- and the emerging
TH-clefts had specificational, exhaustive-listing meaning, but none had the same
syntactic constraints as the pseudo-clefts that will be discussed immediately
below.
3.5.2 Early pseudo-clefts

In the late sixteenth century there is an example in correspondence that appears to be
specificational and to have the biclausal pseudo-cleft structure that came to be
characteristic of pseudo-clefts in the seventeenth century: [[NP NP V] [BE X]],
where NP1 is an object and is relativized. Unlike all in the examples in (41b, c), and
(42a), all in (43) means only, and X is factual:
(43) For it is more then death unto me, that her majestie should be thus ready to
interpret allwayes hardly of my service, . . . All her majestie can laye to my
charge ys going a little furder then she gave me commission for. (1585–6 Earl of
Leicester, Letter to Walsyngham [CEECS])
(43) is from a letter by the Earl of Leicester, a former favorite of Queen Elizabeth’s,
concerning his arrest for treason. Here all can be understood as ‘the only thing’, and
X as ‘the fact that I went a little further than . . . ’. It appears to be an innovation, a
token construct. By hypothesis Leicester was unconsciously making a link to speci-
ficational constructions, especially the TH-cleft, and to uses of all in contexts where
all was deemed less than adequate (see (41b) and chapter 5.3.6 for discussion).
Several examples of a new ALL-pseudo-cleft appear shortly after, and later of
WHAT-pseudo-clefts as well, primarily with a verb of locution such as say or with do
(44). Here ALL and WHAT are objects, do is a pro-verb, X introduced by to is non-
purposive, and the X can be understood as exhaustive, especially when only is
present, as in (44b):
(44) a. there is no possibilitie of overthrowing the new election . . . all you can doe
is to do some good for the tyme to come,which if you can doe conveniently,
and without much trouble, it wilbe woorth your labour. (1624 Oliver
Naylor, Letter to John Cosin [CEEC])
b. thereby to insinuate, That what he did, was only to Preach to such, as could
not come to our Churches. (1661 Stillingfleet, Unreasonableness of Separ-
ation [CEEC])
The new ALL-pseudo-cleft micro-construction can be formalized as [[ALLi NP V]
[BE Xj] $ [Anaphorici, Specificational class memberi low on value scale]]. Likewise
the WHAT-pseudo-cleft micro-construction can be formalized as [[WHATi NP V]
[BE Xj] $ [Anaphorici, Specificational class memberi]].
These examples suggest not only that constructionalization of individual pseudo-
clefts had occurred, but that a new schema has developed. The schema and its
members are new to the system in the way that Meillet envisioned for grammatica-
lization. In terms of specifying function and information structure they are closely
networked with the IT- and TH-clefts. The examples are all anaphoric or at least
invoke a recoverable or pragmatically accessible antecedent.
Very early on ALL-clefts with do appear occasionally without to, evidencing a

further constructional change: full restructuring of do as a pro-verb as in:
(45) What need’st thou woman such a whining keepe?
Thy sonn’s as well as anie man ith’ lande,
Why all he did, was bidd a man but stande,
And told him coyne he lackt.
‘Why, woman, do you need to go on whining so? You son is as well as any man in
the land. Why, all he did was tell a man to stand, and told him he lacked money’.
(1616 Goddard, A Mastiff Vvhelp [LION: EEBO])
3.5.3 The later history of ALL- and WHAT-pseudo-clefts

The textual data show that during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the
set of verbs used in the relative clause of pseudo-clefts expanded from do, say to
include statives such as mean, desire, and occasionally an intransitive but continued to
be dominantly transitive until the mid nineteenth century. In CLMETEV, the first
example of what happened with WHAT as subject and an intransitive verb in a pseudo-
cleft is (46):
(46) Here they again anchored on the 11th. Their reception was, however, very
different. No crowd of canoes round the ship; no enthusiastic mass of natives
on shore. Everything was silence. What had happened was that the king
had departed, leaving the bay under ‘tabu’, i.e. a sacred interdict. (1768–71
Captain Cook, Journal [CL 1])
The next example occurs a hundred years later, so (46) appears to be an innovation.
However, between 1868 and 1914 there are five examples. The first example in OBP
appears as late as 1901 (47a), although trials favour narratives about what happened.
The first example in COHA is dated 1913 (47b) and the first example of all that
happened in a pseudo-cleft is dated 1920 (47c). This suggests that happen came to be
associated with narrative pseudo-clefts in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.
(47) a. I never hit the man at all. What happened was that Bignall turned round to
me; he threw his arm up, and I threw my arm up. (1901 Trial of George
Watson, t19010722-545 [OBP])
b. There was no peace for us even on the Barrier. What happened was that the
entire feminine population—eleven in number—had thought fit to appear
in a condition usually considered ‘interesting’. (1913 Chater, South Pole
[COHA])
c. He didn't commit adultery. I don't want you to think that happened. All
that happened was he bit my best girl, Nell Hunter, on the neck. (1920
Anderson, Poor White [COHA])
With the development of use with intransitive verbs, by the mid nineteenth century
the syntactic template was [[WHAT/ALL (NP) V] [BE X]], like that of TH-clefts, in
which TH- could be subject from the beginning, as in (39).
ALL-clefts with do but no infinitive marker to are attested very early (see (45),
which dates back to 1616), However, WHAT-clefts with an unmarked non-finite
clause after do do not appear until the twentieth century and are rare until the later
part of the century. Two early examples are:28
(48) a. what he did was put the items of the program in the order of their newly
realized importance. (1929 American Electric Railway Assoc. [Google Books,
accessed April 12th 2011)
b. What Meher Baba did was eat, play ping pong and cricket with his
follower. (Feb 25 1932 Time [TIME])
Rohdenburg (1998: 195) cites research showing very low percentages of to in ALL-
clefts with do (17% in the 1991 Guardian and 7.8% in the 1991 Washington Times). The
percentage with to is, however, much higher for pseudo-clefts with all, what, thing(s)
combined (32.4% in the 1991 Guardian), and 50.3% for WHAT-clefts with do in The
Times and Sunday Times in 1994 (Rohdenburg 1998: 196). This suggests suggests that
a significant change to WHAT-clefts occurred in the latter half of the twentieth
century. For the first three centuries WHAT-clefts with do were not directly matched
to or modeled on ALL-clefts with do, but in the mid-twentieth century, as WHAT-
clefts came to be used more frequently than the originally more frequent ALL-clefts,
to in WHAT-clefts with do were reduced and, whether by analogization, or by
general reduction processes, came to be more similar to the ALL-clefts.
Investigating contemporary conversation, Hopper and Thompson (2008: 105)
suggest that in this register WHAT-clefts frame the talk in terms of such categories
as ‘event, action, and paraphrase’ in a monoclausal structure. In their view the
structure is not biclausal, and semantically/pragmatically they are not necessarily
anaphoric, or specificational. Hopper and Thompson argue that at least in the case of
the most frequent verbs in WHAT-clefts (do, happen, say), the initial string is an
‘initial formula’ or ‘projector’ (also referred to as a ‘set-up’, see Massam 1999, Zwicky
2007) that ‘projects’ a text, which immediately follows, i.e. is cataphoric. According to
the concept of projection (Auer 2005), interlocutors have expectations about what is
to be said, and pick up cues routinized for the purpose (see also Hopper 2008: 281).
The frame in pseudo-clefts is a relatively fixed projector of the type that could be
characterized in our notation as [WH (NP) V BE] (note BE belongs to the projector);
this projector evaluates X as of significance to the discourse at hand. Since the initial
string serves as a cue to the hearer that the speaker evaluates what follows as being of
28
Thanks to Christian Mair for both these examples.
some significance, a cleft structure is preferred over a string without a projector for
the announcement of an event, paraphrase, etc.
Hopper and Thompson’s examples are drawn from conversation. There is some
evidence for the monoclausal analysis in (informal) writing as well and in relatively
formal spoken settings. (49a) is from a story in the magazine of the Sunday Inquirer,
and (49b) occurs in the context of the opening statement by the chair of an inter-
cultural meeting in a University setting:
(49) a. Nikki Caine, 19, doesn’t want to be a movie star. What she hopes to do is be
a star on the horse-show circuit. (10/10/1976 Today, p. 44 [Prince 1978: 887])
b. so what I’d like to do is I think it would be very helpful for one of our
colleagues to volunteer to as we say in # in Scotland start the ball rolling cause
we really love football. (Spencer-Oatey and Stadler 2009)
In (49a) do is a pro-verb for be in X. This be is to be understood as ‘come to be’,29 and
is therefore not fully stative. Nevertheless, it also shows not only host-class expansion
of the kind of verb for which do can substitute but a weakening of the link between
the first and second parts of the pseudo-cleft. (48b) is a highly hedged utterance in
which there is no direct structural link between what I’d like to do is and what follows.
There is, however, an implicature that X is ‘ask for one of you to volunteer’, and there
is an accessible givenness in that the chair is expected to set the agenda.
Over the course of the twentieth century, do, happen, and say came to be the most
frequently used Vs in WHAT-clefts. Hopper (2001) cites 118 or 66% do, 23 or 13%
happen, and 15 or 8 % say in the COBUILD corpus, and Koops and Hilpert (2009) cite
55 do, 17 happen, and 6 say in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English
(SBCSAE) of the 1980s; other verbs, e.g. want, mean occur with very low frequency.30
It appears that the changes are from a construction of the type in (50a) in the
seventeenth century, to one of the type in (50b) by the end of the twentieth century
(at least with the verbs that appear with high frequency: do, happen, and say):
(50) a. [[ALL/WHATi NP V] [BE Xj] $ [Anaphorici, Specificational class memberi,]]
b. [ALL/WHAT (NP) V BE [Xi] $ [Cataphoric framing - Eventi]]
If this analysis is correct, we may note that it has some of the characteristics of the
kind of reduction from biclausal to monoclausal structure that Lehmann (2008)
discusses (see 3.2.1 above). However, it is not the case that ‘pragmatic relations lose
their specificity’ (Lehmann 2008: 213); rather there is a change in pragmatics.
‘Specificational’ pragmatics associated with identifying referents of sets has given
29
Thanks to Eric Smitterberg for this observation.
30
Since Koops and Hilpert (2009) interpret WHAT-pseudo-clefts as focus constructions, and do not
restrict them to specificational discourse function, they include several other WHAT-expressions in their
inventory, e.g. what is more/worse/of importance BE X. Most of these are cataphoric.
way to the pragmatics of indexing upcoming discourse. What was originally subject-
ive pragmatics (the speaker identifies referents and sets) has become more inter-
actional (the speaker gives the hearer metatextual cues about what the hearer should
attend to), but neither is more or less ‘specific’ than the other.
By hypothesis, use of the WHAT-cleft as a projector may have had two kinds of
sources. One may have been the development of a formula like What I said was this:
X. Such formulae begin to appear in OBP in the late eighteenth century (see (51a)),
and what happened was this (51b):
(51) a. he says, as near as he can guess, what he said was this, that he seized a
person's hand near his pocket, which appeared to be the prisoner, and
therefore he believed him to be the person. (1789 Trial of George Barrington,
t17891209-18 [OBP])
b. But I knew at once that he had undone me! What happened was this. The
audience got together, attracted by Governor Gorges's name . . . . (1868 Hale,
If, Yes and Perhaps [COHA])
Both these formulae are, however, anaphoric as well as cataphoric. The most likely
source is expansion of the pseudo-cleft construction to intransitive verbs as this
seems particularly likely to have enabled the initial string to be reinterpreted by at
least some speakers as a narrative projection marker similar to so. Loss of to in
WHAT-clefts with do is presumably symptomatic of the change, suggesting it did not
occur till the later part of the twentieth century. These developments were probably
indirectly influenced by the development of a large set of projectors such as the fact/
problem/point is from the mid-eighteenth century on (Curzan 2012), but that hypoth-
esis needs to be followed up.
3.5.4 Discussion
The development of TH- and ALL-clefts around 1600 and of WHAT-clefts slightly
later can be considered to be prime examples of the development of new micro-
constructions in contrastive, adversative contexts. Interpreting pseudo-clefts as
having an information-structuring, especially focus-marking function, Traugott
(2008c) earlier showed that they are instances of grammaticalization in so far as
they involve fixing of an information-structuring pattern and, in the case of do, loss
of concrete semantic meaning. She suggested that the further development of
WHAT-clefts (and possibly of ALL and TH-clefts as well, although this remains to
be investigated) into monoclausal structures can be interpreted as an example of
grammaticalization of the kind Lehmann (2008) discusses: a historically initial
biclausal cleft construction occurring largely in contrastive, contesting contexts,
eventually becomes reduced to a monoclausal one. They also provide evidence of
Himmelmann’s (2004) three types of expansion. There is semantic-pragmatic
expansion with the development of constructions that signal exhaustive listing in

addition to those that are descriptive or purposive like (39)–(42), and with the
assignment of the restrictive ‘only’ meaning to all. In the twentieth century some
pseudo-clefts with frequent verbs start to have a new discourse function in WHAT-
clefts: framing event, paraphrase, etc. (semantic-pragmatic expansion). There is host
class expansion in that the set of verbs in V (at first mainly do and say) is expanded to
use with mean, desire, want, happen, and also the set of verbs in X after do (e.g. use of
be ‘become’). And even though there is reduction in form there is syntactic expansion
when bare infinitives with do start to be used with WHAT-clefts since an alternative
syntax has come into being. We suggest that all these factors apply equally well to
grammatical constructionalization.
With respect to possible analogy, it is striking that initially ALL and WHAT-clefts
appear not to have been directly influenced by TH-clefts, at least with respect to being
used as subject. Furthermore, while ALL-clefts with do did not require to in non-finite
X from the very earliest times, WHAT-clefts with do required to for over two hundred
and fifty years. There is therefore little evidence of local analogization in the sense of
close constructional exemplar pattern match. However, it is important not to ignore
the relationship to the larger network of specificational clefts generally, including
IT-clefts and TH-clefts. As mentioned in 3.5.1 IT-clefts appear not to have been direct
precursors of pseudo-clefts. However, over time IT-clefts came to have structures
more closely aligned to those of pseudo-clefts in that they came to allow clauses as
well as NPs and adverbials. Likewise, ALL- and WHAT-clefts have become more
closely aligned with IT-clefts as usage with NPs expanded (What she wanted was his
property again). There has therefore been an aligning of structures within the speci-
ficational cleft family. The forms of the IT-clefts and pseudo-clefts are too dissimilar
for the members of this family to belong to one schema given Goldberg’s criterion that
each node inherits the properties of its dominating nodes (2.4.2), but they are clearly
close in the network, being specificational and clefted.
Finally, we may note that the complexity and specificity of pseudo-clefts provides
evidence for the play-off between competing motivations that Goldberg (1995: 67–68)
characterizes as the Principle of Maximized Expressive Power, ‘the inventory of
constructions is maximized for communicative purposes’ and the Principle of Maxi-
mized Economy, where ‘the number of distinct constructions is minimized as much
as possible’. On the one hand, language users seek clarity and specificity in the detail
of each individual construction, leading to an increase in the number of distinct
constructions. On the other hand, language users seek to generalize wherever
possible, leading to a simpler system. This interplay between expressiveness
and economy means that ‘the two principles mutually constrain each other’
(Goldberg 1995: 69). Without such a constraint, language users in the seventeenth
century could have developed a general schematic form such as [[ALL NP V] [V
X]] rather than the one proposed ([[ALL NP V] [BE X]]). But that would have
overgeneralized (we do not find examples like All/What Jane did went talk about it).
Instead the micro-construction is a partial schema in which the specific verb BE is an
essential component, the unique member of the slot.
As the pseudo-clefts show, the constructional network is constantly undergoing
shifts, but those shifts are checked by one or other of these two principles: economy
leads to the growth of schematic constructions (because they are the most general),
while expressiveness leads to the development of specific constructions (because they
provide the most detail).
3.6 Summary
In this chapter we have focused on the development of procedural constructions by
grammatical constructionalization and have considered how a constructionalization
approach can incorporate and in some cases enhance, the insights of work done in
the research paradigm known as grammaticalization. We have proposed that:
(a) Grammatical constructionalization is the development through a series of
small-step changes of a formnew-meaningnew sign that is (mostly) procedural
in function. A grammatical sign cues how the speaker conceptualizes relation-
ships between referents within the clause(s), and how the addressee is to
interpret the clause(s). In many cases grammatical constructionalization
involves loss of lexical meaning but the sources may also be non-lexical, as
in the case of the pseudo-clefts.
(b) A constructionalist perspective supports the model of grammaticalization as
expansion (GE). At the same time it is compatible with the model of gramma-
ticalization as reduction and increased dependency (GR). This is because
grammatical constructionalization involves expansion in construction-types
and range of use on the one hand, and chunking and fixing of form on the
other. Expansion is the logical outcome of attrition resulting from repetition
and chunking.
(c) Expansion and reduction may be intertwined, e.g. bleaching (loss of lexical
meaning) may lead to expanded use, which may in turn be followed by
reduction of the signal. Grammatical constructionalization shows only partial
directionality, since after expansion, constructions may be subject to margin-
alization and obsolescence.
(d) Grammatical constructionalization is the outcome of changes, not a process
(see also Joseph 2001, 2004 and elsewhere on grammaticalization as result).
(e) Degrammaticalization, which depends on a GR approach to grammaticaliza-
tion, can be rethought in constructionalist terms. Some examples, such as
deinflectionalization, appear to be cases of expansion in schematicity under
specific circumstances.
(f ) Analogical thinking is an important factor in the increase of productivity and

schematicity. Analogization accounts for alignment of new micro-construc-
tions into (sub)schemas.
(g) Because the constructional approach models different aspects of form and
meaning as distributed over different features of a construction, it is possible to
model the step-wise interplay of both dimensions in the creation and subse-
quent history of a construction.
The key contribution of a constructional perspective to earlier work on gramma-
ticalization is that the grammatical architecture demands thinking in terms of both
form and meaning equally. As a result, the ‘other side of the equation’ that is always
at least covertly present but often backgrounded in work on grammaticalization as
change in form or grammaticalization as change in meaning must be brought to the
fore. Likewise, networks among constructions provide a framework for thinking
about how analogical thinking and analogization play a role in grammatical change.
Grammaticalization as GR was developed assuming a modular theory of grammar.
So was GE, but assuming a less restrictive view of grammar. The findings of
grammaticalization are and will continue to be foundational to work on grammatical
constructionalization since they provide the evidence for the micro-changes that lead
to and result from grammatical constructionalization, and to likelihoods of recruit-
ment to schemas. When grammaticalization occurs is key to identifying when new
grammatical formnew-meaningnew pairing occurs. What precedes are enabling con-
structional changes, what follow are constructional changes, often involving ana-
logical expansions as well as morphophonological reductions. Although important
for understanding change, the issue of directionality is not criterial for grammatical
constructionalization, because the phenomenon of directionality becomes apparent
primarily from a GR perspective with focus on developing items, not on the contexts,
sets and schemas within which the item develops. And while all change, including
analogization, is neoanalysis, analogization is an important factor as constructions
develop. A non-modular view of grammar that privileges routines, chunks, sets, and
schemas, also shows that grammatical changes are more far-reaching that might be
supposed under traditional views of grammaticalization.
4
Lexical Constructionalization
4.1 Introduction
In this chapter, we present our view of lexical constructionalization in detail, with
some attention to its relationship to earlier work on lexicalization. As shown in
chapter 3, a constructional approach to language change invites the researcher to
rethink the development of grammatical constructions in terms of schematic as well
as substantive constructionalization. It also invites rethinking the development of
lexical constructions in similar terms. The output of constructionalization is a new
node in the language network that may be more towards the ‘contentful’ end of the
continuum, or more towards the ‘procedural’ end. Our focus in this chapter is on the
development of new signs which are formnew-meaningnew and in which the meaning
pole is associated mainly with concrete semantics and the form pole with major
categories such as N, V, or ADJ.
The chapter is organized as follows. In section 4.2 we introduce our approach to
thinking about lexical constructions, including lexical schemas. In section 4.3 we
consider some of the ways in which the term ‘lexicalization’ has in the past been used
in work in diachronic linguistics. We start our discussion of ways in which dia-
chronic lexicalization has been treated in the past with discussion of positions
in which ‘grammatical’ and ‘lexical’ material are seen as discrete (4.3.1), then move
on to approaches that include both kinds of material in one inventory of specific
(non-schematic) expressions (4.3.2), and finally point to some ways in which a
constructional approach can move toward reconciling the issues (4.3.3). Section 4.4
is concerned with the characteristics of constructionalization identified in chapter
1.4.2: changes in productivity, schematicity, and compositionality, with focus on
lexical constructionalization. In chapter 3.4 we suggested that in grammatical con-
structionalization there is a degree of directionality involved, in that constructions
that develop a procedural function are typically more schematic, more productive
and less compositional. Since the development of lexical constructions may be shown
to involve both expansion and schematicity, like that of grammatical constructions,
these factors continue to be relevant; however, we will show that in lexical construc-
tionalization they have less predictive power for directionality. The principal data
sections are 4.5 and 4.6, which are distinguished in terms of the kind of output. 4.5
discusses the development of new complex micro-constructions and schemas, such
as word-formation patterns. 4.6 discusses the development of new atomic construc-
tions out of complex constructions. In section 4.7 we touch on a range of largely
contentful phrasal and clausal idioms including ‘snowclones’, schemas that grow
from relatively fixed micro-constructions that are usually formulae or clichés (e.g. X
is the new Y ). 4.8 addresses the issue of instantaneous, type node creation where the
semantic pole of the construction is referential. This includes the development of
‘extra-grammatical’ forms like acronyms, clippings and blends. We argue that these
are instances of lexical constructionalization, but, unlike instances of grammatical
constructionalization, and many other instances of lexical constructionalization, they
do not arise gradually. In 4.9 we revisit issues raised in chapter 3.4 and consider the
hypothesized relationship between degrammaticalization and the creation of new
lexical constructions. 4.10 provides a summary of the chapter.
Although for purposes of presentation we have divided chapters 3 and 4 into
grammatical and lexical constructionalization, we consider them to be on a gradient,
and intertwined, not in opposition. As indicated in chapter 2.7.6, there is some
debate, for example, about whether the way-construction is lexical or grammatical.
We have argued that although it is at neither end of the lexical-grammatical con-
tinuum, it has over time become more procedural, as evidenced by the iterativity of
the newest subschema (accidental accompaniment). Many other partially lexical,
partially grammatical constructions could be considered, e.g. the development of
[give NP a V-ing] as in give him a talking to (Trousdale 2008a), [take NP and VTR
Pronoun (Adverbial)] as in take a pair of scissors and cut it off (Hopper 2008), and
take prisoner (Berlage 2012). In this chapter, however, we consider constructionaliza-
tion that involves the development of primarily contentful expressions and focus on
more prototypical cases of lexical constructionalization.
4.2 On some characteristics of lexical constructions

In modular frameworks, a distinction is typically made between the lexicon as the
repository of idiosyncrasies and the grammar as the combinatorial system, a distinc-
tion articulated in Bloomfield (1933: 274) as: ‘the lexicon is really an appendix of the
grammar, a list of basic irregularities’. The list includes both lexical and grammatical
expressions. As Bloomfield also says:
Strictly speaking . . . every morpheme of a language is an irregularity, since the speaker can use
it only after hearing it used, and the reader of a linguistic description can know of its existence
only if it is listed for him. (Bloomfield 1933: 274)
Also considering grammar to be associated with the system, lexicon with idiosyncra-
sies, Lightfoot (2011: 439) has recently explicitly suggested that ‘the lexicon arguably
Lexical Constructionalization 151
entails all words and certain word parts, regardless of their being more grammatical/
systemic or more lexical/idiosyncratic’. While this may sound like a ‘constructicon’ it
is not, since expressions in the ‘lexicon’ are specific only, while in the constructicon
they are schematic as well as specific.
As discussed throughout this book, the constructional approach relies on a non-
modular framework of language, and treats it as a hierarchized conceptual network.
In this model the inventory is the constructicon (see 1.4.1) which consists of
constructions of various sizes from affixes (-ness, un-, -s plural) to clauses (SAI).
Like entries in the lexicon as conceived by Lightfoot (2011), constructions in the
constructicon may be contentful (twist, mature, X is the new Y ) or procedural (e.g.
number, tense, some subschemas of the way-construction). They may be substantive
(micro-constructions) or (partially) schematic. Among partially schematic construc-
tions are lexical word-formation schemas such as schemas for forming deverbal
nouns (swimmer, researcher) and deadjectival verbs (lexicalize, grammaticalize),
and various (semi)idiomatic phrases and clauses (not the sharpest tool in the box,
you’ll be lucky to). These are the main topic of the present chapter.
In chapter 3 we showed that grammatical constructions may be schemas, and that
grammatical constructionalization typically leads to increased schematization. We
also showed that grammatical constructionalization involves initial decrease in
compositionality at the micro-constructional level, and that post-constructionalization
constructional changes may be accompanied by both increase in construct frequency
and internal reduction as the micro-construction increases its collocational range.
Here we suggest that word-formation schemas undergo similar changes. The main
differences between word-formation schemas and grammatical schemas are that the
former involve bound morphemes, whereas the latter may be entirely made up of free
morphemes (see also Croft 2001: 17; Booij 2010). Furthermore, word-formation
schemas have primarily contentful meaning and major syntactic category form
(noun, verb, adjective), while grammatical schemas always have procedural mean-
ings, at least in part. However, both may be productive and schematic in ways to be
discussed in 4.4.
Like syntactic strings, morphological expressions can be positioned on a gradient
ranging from fully substantive to fully schematic expressions (see Croft 2007a). As
Booij (2010, 2013) observes, this approach to morphology suggests that, as a pattern of
regularity, word-formation is schematic. In our representation of lexical constructions,
we follow Booij’s approach, which is in turn based largely on the model espoused by
Jackendoff (2002; see also 2013). Given that users of English are regularly exposed to
constructs like fixable, squeezable, and washable, with the meanings ‘can be fixed’, ‘can
be squeezed’ and ‘can be washed’, respectively, a schema may be abstracted across these
instances of use, represented as follows (adapted from Booij 2013):
(1) [[Vtri-able]aj $ [[can undergo process denoted by VTRi]PROPERTY]j]
This may be read as: transitive verb stem (VTR) plus -able, which together form an
adjective (A), is linked with the meaning ‘can undergo the process denoted by the
transitive verb’. ‘Property’ denotes the typical meaning of the atomic lexical schema
which has the form A. In this and other representations below, the formal represen-
tation does not distinguish between the phonological and morphosyntactic subcom-
ponents of the construction.
The schema in (1) represents a prototype for this particular lexical construction. It
is a productive word-formation schema, witnessed by new constructs like skypable.
As mentioned in previous chapters, a more productive schema will typically have a
higher type frequency, possibly including a large number of ‘hapax legomena’
(Baayen 2003, Baayen and Renouf 1996, Hay and Baayen 2005). Hapax legomena
are one-offs, therefore constructs, but they have the potential to become convention-
alized as a construction, as was illustrated with the example of shoot one’s way in
chapter 2.7.4.
As a schema that generalizes across a set of subschemas, (1) fully sanctions, i.e.
constrains and specifies the well-formedness of, micro-constructions like fixable,
squeezable, and washable.1 In these cases, the base does not change its phonological
shape, and the meaning of the schema is elaborated through the specification of the
meaning of the verb in each instance. However, the schema only partially sanctions
micro-constructions like drinkable (when used to describe a wine, for instance) and
despicable. In the former case, although the phonological shape of the base remains
the same (so the construct is fully sanctioned on the formal side), the meaning is not
‘can be drunk’ but rather ‘pleasing to drink’. In the case of despicable, neither the
form nor the meaning is fully sanctioned—the meaning is not ‘can be despised’ but
rather ‘ought to be despised’. While for some speakers there may be a phonological
alternation between the free form despise and the bound form despic-, for others the
degree of opacity between the free and the bound forms may be so great for some
speakers that despicable is not treated as a composite unit. An example Booij (2010:
27) gives is Dutch werk-baar (‘workable, feasible’), which is derived from an intransi-
tive verb werk; all other adjectives in -baar are derived from transitive verbs (p. 27)
(see Booij 2013 for a related discussion). These special cases are examples of what
Lakoff (1987) refers to as ‘overrides’, exceptions to general rules that have to be
learned. As in the case of grammatical subschemas discussed in chapter 3, ‘each node
inherits properties from its dominating node’ (Booij 2010: 25). The concept of
overrides is crucial for the notion of default inheritance (see chapter 2.4.2), since
overrides apply when default inheritance does not (see further Hudson 2010: 28–9).
Indeed, as Booij (2010, 2013) observes, the approach to morphology outlined here
suggests that lexical constructions are hierarchical and that default inheritance plays
1
Full and partial sanction are discussed in chapter 2, section 2.2.2.
a significant role in them. We may therefore establish an inheritance hierarchy as

represented in Figure 4.1 for some instances of the schema in (1), where a distinction
is made between full sanction (f ) and partial sanction (p):
[[VTRi-able]Aj ↔ [[‘can be SEMi-ed’]PROPERTY]j]
p f f f p
despicable washable squeezable fixable drinkable

[override: [override
form: despic- meaning:
meaning: ‘ought ‘pleasant to drink’]
to be despised’]
Figure 4.1 A schema for some lexical constructions in -able
Schemas may vary in productivity. For instance, exocentric compounds are more
productive than are endocentric ones. An example of an endocentric VN compound
is swearword, which is a kind of word (the N is the determinatum), and an example of
an exocentric VN compound is pickpocket, which is not a kind of pocket (the N is not
the determinatum) nor a kind of picking.2 We return to the issues of productivity and
schematicity in section 4.4.
At the level of the micro-construction Booij (2010, 2013) distinguishes between
parts of compounds and affixoids. Compounds are made up of two more or less
independent words but since the meaning of the compound is not entirely compos-
itional, it forms a separate, but still complex, form-meaning pairing from a phrase
made up of the independent words (Bauer 1983: 11). Furthermore, in a language with
morphological inflections, the first element of a compound typically loses those
inflections, and in a stress language like English there is a stress pattern difference
between the free phrase and the compound (see further Giegerich 2004, 2005 on the
relation between phrase and compound in English). For example, black and bird
are autonomous words. Combined in the compound blackbird they refer to a
particular type of black bird (blackbird excludes e.g. crow, raven) and have a different
stress pattern (contrast compound bláckbird with phrasal black bírd). In some cases
free form-meaning pairings combine in such a way that one member is assigned a
more abstract meaning when used in particular compounds. It is known then as an
2
In a compound, the modifying non-head is called the ‘determinant’, and the category-determining
‘head’ (Booij 2007: 53) the ‘determinatum’. To avoid confusion with the syntactic term ‘head’, we will refer,
as is customary in much of the morphological literature, to ‘determinant’ and ‘determinatum’.
‘affixoid’. Booij (e.g. 2010: 57) argues affixoids are on a gradient between highly
contentful (e.g. bird above), and highly abstract derivational affixes (e.g. -er):
They are not yet affixes because they correspond to lexemes, that is, unbound forms, but their
meaning differs from that when used as independent lexemes. (Booij 2010: 57)
Examples of affixoids that Booij cites include Dutch reus ‘giant’, followed by a linking
element (-e) in expressions such as reuze-leuk ‘very nice’ (p. 56), where reuze has an
intensifying function. While Booij’s argument is essentially synchronic, the principles
are clearly very important for diachronic analysis. He observes:
such subschemas explain why parts of compounds can develop into real affixes (Booij 2005):
words receive a special ‘bound’, often more abstract interpretation within compounds. (Booij
2013: 260)
One of the distinguishing features of an affixoid is that, because the meaning has been
generalized, it can enable the development of a productive word-formation pattern
which forms a subschema of the compounding schema. Later some productive word-
formation patterns may become emancipated from the compound schema and
merged with other word-formation schemas. We will discuss such developments in
sections 4.5 and 4.6.
To distinguish the three kinds of morphological relationships within lexical
schemas and the micro-constructions which they sanction we need a special nota-
tion. Small capitals (e.g. dom) are used in cases where, for ease of exposition, we
ignore distinctions between relevant morphological categories such as ‘word’, ‘elem-
ent of compound’, ‘affixoid’ and ‘affix’. In cases where we need to be more explicit in
describing specific issues, particularly in relation to change, we use a vertical line to
separate elements of a compound (e.g. black|bird, OE biscop|dom ‘bishop|jurisdic-
tion’), a hyphen to separate an affixoid from its base (e.g. Dutch reuze-leuk ‘very nice’,
ME cyning-dom ‘territory ruled by a king’), and a period to separate an affix from its
base or stem (e.g. PDE mis.trust).
The fact that the derivational morphology involved in word-formation is sche-
matic may be one of the reasons that it is sometimes included in discussions of
grammaticalization (see 4.3.3 below). Another is the fact that some word-formation
is more procedural than others. While word-formation is almost always associated
with categories like N, V, and ADJ, some has more traditionally grammatical
characteristics than others, e.g. derivational affixes that derive nouns (e.g. ness,
ity, ism), verbs (ify, ize), adjectives (ic as in Milton.ic, able as in squeez.able,
with modal meaning), and adverbs (ly as in slow.ly, wise as in cross.wise) are more
grammatical than ‘reversal’ un in un.tie, or more recently ‘atypical’ un in un.cola. Of
these, derivational affixes like -able, which has partially modal meaning are closest to
having procedural meaning.
A particularly interesting case is discussed in Petré and Cuyckens (2008): that of

the use in OE of the preposition be as a verb prefix in a schematic construction [[Subj
be.V OBJ OBL] $ [Subj totally affects Obj by means of V]]. Here an intransitive verb
like ridan ‘to ride’, gan ‘to go’ is used transitively and the constructional meaning is
that an area was totally covered, or an object was totally affected (an aspectual
meaning). For ‘total coverage’ compare (2a) with (2b):
(2) a. Cyneheard . . . hine þær be.rad ond þone bur
Cyneheard . . . him there around.rode and the chamber
utan be.eode
from-outside around-went.
‘Cyneheard . . . besieged him there and surrounded the chamber from the
outside’. (c890 ChronA (Plummer) 755 [Petré and Cuyckens 2008: 160])
b. Her rad se here ofer Mierce innan East Engle.
here rode the army through Mercia into East Anglia
‘This year the army rode through Mercia into East Anglia’. (c890 ChronA
(Plummer) 870 [Petré and Cuyckens 2008: 160])
Over time the aspectual telic, ‘total coverage, affectedness’ meaning of the construc-
tion was weakened, and, as the construction obsolesced,3 some derived verb forms
became unanalyzable atomic lexical constructions, e.g. befoul (see section 4.5.2 for
this type of development in the domain of nouns).
In their proposal that grammaticalization is the development of secondary func-
tions, Boye and Harder (2012: 19) briefly revisit the question of whether derivational
morphology is grammatical and conclude that it is, on the grounds that, like
grammatical morphology, it has the secondary function of ‘an accompanying expres-
sion’ (p. 28). They explicitly reject attempts to distinguish between more lexical and
more grammatical derivation (see e.g. Hopper and Traugott 2003: 5) on grounds that
the difference is one of meaning (p. 19). Consistent with our view of the gradient
between lexical and grammatical constructions, and our attempt to build a compre-
hensive view of constructional change, we distinguish lexical and grammatical
morphology on the basis of contentful versus procedural function. We therefore
distinguish between derivational morphology such as ness or dom which has
primarily lexical function and the prefix be which has primarily procedural function.
With this framework in mind, we now shift the focus to the diachronic evolution
of lexical word-formations. But first, by way of introduction, we briefly review some
3
In PDE the construction is still available, though with low productivity. It was early extended to non-
verbs, usually with the generalized meaning of ‘furnished with’ (e.g. bespouse), and in contemporary
coinings is often used in a humorous way, cf. bespectacled, becostumed (Petré and Cuyckens 2008). Note
that all contemporary coinings are participial forms of verbs only, and thus have limited distribution
(*I bespectacled my son this morning).
existing work on the phenomenon of lexicalization (for more extensive discussion see
Brinton and Traugott 2005).
4.3 Some approaches to lexicalization

To date, the work on lexicalization has been conducted primarily from the perspec-
tive of reduction. This perspective is similar to the GR perspective in work on
grammaticalization, and by partial analogy we call it ‘lexicalization as increased
reduction’ (LR).4 Reviewing various approaches to lexicalization, Blank (2001: 1603)
summarizes a number of positions, of which we focus on two, the first more general,
the second narrower, as follows:
Lexicalization1 is a process by which complex word-formations and other syntagmatic con-
structions become syntactically and semantically fixed entries of the mental lexicon.
Lexicalization3 is a process by which complex words become simple words.
An example he gives of lexicalization1 is the compound bullet|hole (p. 1599). Like

black|bird discussed above, this has a fixed order, stress on bullet rather than hole, and
is semantically restricted since it means only a hole made by a bullet, not to put one in
(compare button|hole). An example of lexicalization3 is ModE barn, from OE bere
‘barley’ + ærn ‘place’ (Brinton and Traugott 2005: 97).
In some cases, the prime research question has been how to distinguish lexicaliza-
tion from grammaticalization, assuming both involve reduction. One thread has been
an attempt to show they are essentially complementary (Lehmann 1989, 2002),
another that there are areas of overlap but also difference (Wischer 2000, Brinton
and Traugott 2005), but in all cases, reduction from complex to simple is a common
theme. We first consider the position that ‘grammatical’ and ‘lexical’ material are
distinct and indeed discrete and then consider ways in which they are similar.
4.3.1 Alleged discrete outputs of lexicalization and grammaticalization

The extreme position that the output of lexicalization and grammaticalization is
discrete is identifiable with what Himmelmann (2004: 21) calls the ‘box approach (or
metaphor)’, in which two aspects of language—the material that a language user has to
learn (the lexicon), and the combinatorial possibilities of a language (the grammar)—
are contained in different ‘boxes’, from which and into which various linguistic items
move. Himmelmann cites Lehmann (1989) as an example of this approach, although
Lehmann conceptualizes grammar as a continuum with lexical and grammatical poles
(see his model in e.g. Lehmann 1989: 16–17, 2002: 3), and indeed says grammatical and
lexical morphemes are ‘both members of the morphemicon’ (Lehmann 2002: 4).
4
For the most part the literature on lexicalization, as opposed to grammaticalization, does not address
increased dependency, or claims it is reduced (see section 4.3.1). Therefore it is not fully parallel to GR.
Lehmann can be inferred to assume a ‘box’ approach despite his focus on a

continuum and positing of a single morphemicon, because of the rigid distinction
he seeks to establish between the two outputs. He says that both grammaticalization
and lexicalization must be considered in terms not of their starting-point (Start-
punkt), but of their end-point (Zielpunkt), a position with which we agree. But
he goes on:
Alles, was eine Einheit in die Grammatik zieht, ist Grammaticalisierung; alles, was eine Einheit
ins Lexicon zieht, ist Lexikalisierung. ‘Everything that draws a unit into the grammar is
grammaticalization; everything that draws a unit into the lexicon is lexicalization’. (Lehmann
1989: 15)
This suggests that he sees the prototype output of both lexicalization and gramma-
ticalization as units (Einheit ‘unit’) and thinks of the poles ‘grammar’ and ‘lexicon’ as
if they were in fact discrete storage boxes into which the language user deposits
linguistic items of different kinds.
A construction grammar approach to the development of new signs is inconsistent
with a position that there are two ‘boxes’. First, constructionalization foregrounds the
gradation between lexical and grammatical constructions rather than discreteness.
If knowledge of language is knowledge of constructions (i.e. conventional symbolic
units), the question of which ‘box’ something goes in becomes vacuous. Furthermore,
as schemas typically involve some combination of procedural and referential mean-
ing, it is hard to compartmentalize. Rather, what we observe in instances where
formnew-meaningnew pairings come into being is that the new unit has developed
either a procedural function (in the case of grammatical constructionalization), or a
contentful function (in the case of lexical constructionalization), or a combination of
both. Lightfoot (2011: 439–440) cites Meillet’s (1958[1912]: 139) well-known suggestion
that the reconstructed phrase *hiu tagu ‘this day, today’ was grammaticalized as Old
High German hiutu, German heute as an example of the problem of distinguishing
grammaticalization from lexicalization. In our view heute ‘today’, being an adverb, is
partially procedural, but also contentful; in other words, it is both procedural and
contentful, like many other adverbs.5
One of the problems with the quotation above from Lehmann is what is meant by
‘unit’. A major claim in both Lehmann (1989) and (2002) is that ‘only complex units
may be lexicalized’ (2002: 13). In Lehmann’s view, when lexicalization occurs, a
complex unit of the type [XY]Z ceases to be complex and is accessed as a unit: Z as
a whole is affected, and the dependency relationship between X and Y is obliterated.
5
In our view adverbs are an intermediate category on the gradient between lexical and grammatical
constructions. Some are primarily contentful (e.g. quickly), and others primarily procedural (e.g. even, only
as focus markers). Recently Giegerich (2012) has argued that adverbs are inflected adjectives, which would
suggest they are contentful. The status of the many adverbial schemas is the topic for further research.
Brinton and Traugott (2005: 96) similarly focus on ‘loss of internal constituency’.
The complex unit therefore becomes non-compositional. In constructionalization
terms, Lehmann’s important insight can be recast as one kind of decrease in
compositionality. For example, in the development of cupboard, what historically
were two nodes in the network (cup and board) came to be compounded through
repeated use as a chunk. The two individual form-meaning pairings eventually came
to be perceived by the language user as a non-compositional sequence—a single
node, the product of morphosyntactic and morphophonological neoanalyses,
cupboard, with new contentful semantics. This is evidenced by the change in
conventional meaning, from a piece of wood on which cups were placed to a covered
storage unit in a home, and by the change in form to /kUb@d/.
Lehmann contrasts ‘renunciation of [ . . . ] internal analysis’ (Lehmann 2002: 13) in
lexicalization with retention of internal complexity in grammaticalization, and states
that ‘the internal relations of Z become more strict and constrained’. (This is an
example of the GR hypothesis.) Our example of cantare habeo is a case in point: the
stem (cant-) was retained, and the remainder eventually became an atomic affix, a
bound atomic rather than a complex partially free form (habeo could occur in several
positions in the clause, see chapter 1.6.4.2). But the problem is that Lehmann’s
distinction taken to its logical conclusion requires him to argue that ‘the coalescence
of two grammatical morphemes must be called lexicalization’ (Lehmann 2002: 13).
Examples he gives are originally grammatical constructions, e.g. himself (< pronoun
him + pronoun self ) and Vulgar Latin de ex de ‘from out from’ (a sequence of three
prepositions) > Castilian Spanish desde (p. 13). Lehmann contrasts wanna with
gonna. Of wanna he says as ‘the combination of a lexical and a grammatical
morpheme lexicalizes to a modal’ and of gonna, ‘the combination of semi-gramma-
ticalized going with a grammatical morpheme is lexicalized and further grammati-
calized’ (2002: 16). This overdifferentiates a pair that is often thought to be on a
gradient of grammaticalization; for example, Krug (2000) includes want to/wanna
(also going to/gonna and got to/gotta) among emerging and grammaticalizing
modals.6 We conclude that if we were to use Lehmann’s analysis, we would find
the kinds of change in Table 4.1 (Lxn and Gzn are abbreviations for lexicalization and
grammaticalization respectively). To say a sequence of grammatical elements lex-
icalized and then grammaticalized again is unparsimonious when ‘univerbation’ (the
diachronic process of fixing as a single unit at the word level) should be sufficient.
Lindström (2004) attributes the confusion between grammaticalization and lex-
icalization such as is illustrated in Table 4.1 to two separate phenomena. The first is
the ‘example’ confusion. In these cases, one and the same example may be said to
6
Both Lehmann and Krug ignore BE in BE going to.
TABLE 4.1. Lexicalization, grammaticalization, or both?

Example A box model analysis
AAVE BE fixing to > finna (Rickford 1999: 6) Lxn, then Gzn

Latin ad ipsum ‘to itself-acc’ > Italian adesso ‘now’ Lxn, then Gzn
(Giacalone Ramat 1998: 122)
English going to > gonna Lxn, then Gzn
Vulgar Latin de ex de ‘from out of ’ > Old Castilian des de > Lxn, then Gzn
Modern Castilian desde ‘since’
English want to > wanna Lxn
English shall I, shall I > shilly-shally ‘to vacillate’ Lxn
Latin cantare habeo > Fr. chanterai Gzn
show signs of grammaticalization and lexicalization. The second is the ‘process’

confusion, whereby lexicalization has been equated with certain formal changes,
despite those changes also being characteristic of grammaticalization (see Brinton
and Traugott 2005: 110 for a summary of similar as well as different tendencies, given
an increased reduction approach to both lexicalization and grammaticalization, but
including semantic factors).
A further problem with Lehmann’s definition of lexicalization as the process
whereby something becomes lexical in the sense of becoming a unit, and the
reference to the obliteration of the dependency relation between X and Y, is that
there are clear cases where new constructional schemas come into being where a
dependency relationship between X and Y develops (as in the case of compounding),
or changes, but is not obliterated. Lightfoot (2011: 447) points out that there is
gradience in the degree to which boundaries are reduced within lexical compounds;
hence in lexicalization, the whole unit may not undergo change equally. For example,
in Germanic compounds with man, the second constituent undergoes more reduc-
tion than the first (cf. marksman, p. 448). In terms of Booij’s distinctions, -man here
is an affixoid (see 4.2 above).
Another view assuming lexical reduction is expressed by Lipka when he says that
lexicalization is:
the phenomenon, whereby a complex lexeme once coined tends to become a single complete
lexical unit, a simple lexeme. Through this process it loses the character of a syntagma to a
greater or lesser degree. (Lipka 2002: 11)
This view that lexicalization involves the loss of syntagmatic properties ‘to a greater
or lesser degreee’ is particularly interesting from a constructionalist point of view. It
is certainly the case that some syntagms develop more unit-like properties. For
example over the hill meaning ‘old’ is idiomatic and non-compositional; formally it
does not allow internal variation (e.g. *over many hills ‘really old’). But internal
variation is possible in some cases like mother-in-law, which is pluralized in two
ways, mothers-in-law and mother-in-laws. The first of these inflectional patterns
treats the expression as less unit-like, and more analyzable, than the second. This is
true in many other cases where certain expressions develop new variants, including
the creation of idioms and snowclones (see section 4.7).
While Lehmann (2002) distinguishes outputs of grammaticalization and lexicali-
zation in terms of form, Wischer (2000) suggests that the difference is semantic: a
new semantic component is added in lexicalization. Using the example of methinks,
which became specialized as a pragmatic marker as the impersonal construction
became obsolescent, she says:
When a free collocation or an ordinary word-formation is lexicalized, a specific semantic
component is added, so that the new lexical meaning differs from the former compositional
meaning . . . When a linguistic term is grammaticalized, specific semantic components get lost
and an implied categorial or operational meaning is foregrounded. (Wischer 2000: 364–365)
From our perspective, methinks is a frozen relic of an obsolescing impersonal

schema. It was recruited to the class of epistemic adverbs and then to pragmatic
marker function. Since it is adverbial we view it as a change toward more procedural,
therefore grammatical, status.
4.3.2 Lexicalization as entry into the inventory

In the previous section we have focused on attempts to distinguish lexicalization
fairly sharply from grammaticalization, even if similarities or even a continuum
between them are also assumed. If Lehmann’s idea of an inventory or ‘morphemicon’
with both lexical and grammatical morphemes is taken seriously, then lexicalization
could be construed (along with grammaticalization) as ‘adoption into the inventory’
(Brinton and Traugott 2005: 90). In this case the inventory would include a mix of
specific items such as is illustrated in (3):
(3) a. OE lice ‘body’ > ly (adjective- or adverb-forming suffix)
b. OE a (ge)lic ‘ever like’ > each
c. OE gar|leac ‘spear|leek’ > garlic
d. [[mother]N [[in]P [law]N]PP]N’ > [mother-in-law]N
e. OE hand geweorc ‘hand worked’ > handiwork
On this approach all of the (semi-)contentful expressions that have to be learned—
irrespective of how they come into being and of their structure—could be described as
equally the product of lexicalization. This includes regular types of word-formation
such as compounding (e.g. black|bird), or formation with affixoids like -able, and also
the relatively random types of word-formation processes that will be discussed in 4.8,
like clippings (tude < attitude), initialisms (BBC), and acronyms (NASA). We will
argue that new clippings, initialisms, acronyms, etc. are also lexical constructionaliza-
tions, but ones that arise instantly, not gradually.7
The approach also brings together forms that are the product of fusion (like
cupboard and hussy) and forms that are the product of separation (like ex and
ology). For example, Norde (2009: 11) proposes that entry into the inventory (whether
by unpredictable word-formation processes, or via fusion) should be considered
lexicalization: ‘the reason for this is that changes such as clippings and conversions
result in new lexemes, the meaning of which is not fully predictable from the (part of
the) word from which they evolved, nor from the nature of the word-formation
process that formed them’. However, perhaps in part because she focuses on lex-
icalization construed as counterevidence to grammaticalization (see 4.9 below),
Norde excludes productive derivational word-formation from lexicalization.
As we argue in 4.5, in construction grammar terms the constructicon is an inventory,
but unlike the inventory proposed above, it is hierarchical (see e.g. Flickinger 1987,
Booij 2010, Sag 2012). It therefore includes not only specific micro-constructions but
also schemas, and these include word-formation patterns. Such patterns include
productive, compositional methods of creating new lexical items such as compound-
ing, whether endocentric (text|book) or exocentric (high|ball) and affixation, whether
prefixation (en.slave) or suffixation (slave.ry). Considering not only the formal changes
but the functions that new signs are assigned, we suggest below that the creation of
derivational word-formation schemas is a kind of constructionalization.
4.3.3 Toward rethinking views of lexicalization in the light of lexical

constructionalization
As Cowie (1995) and more recently Lightfoot (2011: 448) point out, in the discussion
of both lexicalization and grammaticalization the role of derivation is ignored,
although often mentioned. When derivation is mentioned, it is often associated
with grammaticalization; for reasons we develop in this chapter, we reject this
approach, as it is inconsistent with the constructional framework we have adopted.
Kuryłowicz defined grammaticalization as:
the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from a
less grammatical to a more grammatical status, e.g. from a derivative formant to an inflec-
tional one. (Kuryłowicz 1975[1965]: 69; emphasis added)
citing the ‘[n]umerous instances’ of ‘the evolution collective (derivative) > plural
(inflectional)’ (Kuryłowicz 1975[1965]: 52; italics original). Steps in the development of
derivational morphology are often considered to be instances of grammaticalization
because derivational morphemes are more abstract than the contentful items from
7
We recognize that blends (e.g. smoke + fog > smog) are rather different from other random word-
formation processes. We discuss this in 4.8.
which they derive, and they evidence paradigmatic regularity. For example, Lehmann
(1989) considers the reduction of Old High German haidus ‘form, shape’ to the
derivational morpheme -heit that forms abstract nouns (see -hood) to be a case of
grammaticalization. Haselow (2011) describes the development of dom and Booij
(2010) of affixoids more generally as instances of grammaticalization. Booij writes:
This rise of derivational morphemes is rightly qualified as grammaticalization (Aikhenvald
2007: 58), since these morphemes [including dom, ment and lyT&T] have become affixes. If
situated at the endpoint of grammaticalization, these morphemes have abstract grammatical
properties, but such bound morphemes may still have a rather specific meaning [ . . . ] Hence, it
seems that there is a cline for such bound morphemes ranging from a more lexical to a more
grammatical meaning, a pattern characteristic of grammaticalization. (Booij 2010: 75)
In a similar vein, Haselow suggests that since dom had not yet reached the full status
of a suffix in the earliest periods of the English language, the low type frequencies
may be explained with the fact that ‘-dom was only in the beginning of a gramma-
ticalization process’ (Haselow 2011: 154). Most recently Boye and Harder (2012: 19)
identify derivational morphology with grammatical status; they do not, however, link
derivation to compounding status.
However, as Blank’s (2001) definition of lexicalization1 cited in section 4.3 above
shows, word-formation has also been associated with lexicalization (‘Lexicalization1
is a process by which complex word-formations . . . become syntactically and seman-
tically fixed entries’). We adopt this approach within the framework of constructio-
nalization for outputs of word-formation, as we demonstrate in sections 4.4 and 4.5
below (see also Trips 2009 in her study of -hood, -dom, and -ship).8
Other ways of thinking about types of lexical change include Bauer’s (1983)
proposal that lexicalization can be split into types depending on linguistic levels
(phonology, morphology, syntax). Bauer suggests that phonological lexicalization
may involve a shift in stress patterns (black|board) or reduction of a syllable (see
reduction of fam in infamous vs. famous). The development of linking elements (e.g.
s in catseye, kinsman) can be taken as diagnostic of morphological lexicalization.
Atypical syntactic patterns (observed, for instance in the development of exocentric
compounds like pick|pocket) serve as instances of syntactic lexicalization.9 But Bauer
(1983) goes on to say that there are many cases of ‘mixed lexicalizations’, which
involve phonological as well as morphological changes, and result in demotivation
and development of atomic lexical items like husband (see also Wischer 2000). Such
mixed patterns are typical of the kind of lexical constructionalization that produces
atomic constructions, as discussed in section 4.6 below.
8
Thanks to Martin Hilpert for drawing our attention to this reference.
9
While the syntax is typical with respect to the typology of VO word order of PDE, with respect to
word-formation it is unusual (contrast the more regular OV patterns in manhunt, watchmaker,
skyscraper).
Since a constructional approach is not founded in a view of change as reduction,

lexicalization can, like grammaticalization, be rethought, and embedded within the
larger project of constructionalization and constructional changes. As a first step, a
key consideration should not be whether an element is either lexical or grammatical,
but whether the output of change is primarily schematic or specific, complex or
atomic, and primarily contentful or primarily procedural. Furthermore, gradience in
between all these pairs must be recognized. We agree with Lehmann that the
development of new contentful constructions can involve the obliteration of a
dependency relationship between X and Y, but we consider this to be a feature of
other types of constructionalization as well. Further, we note that both grammatical
and lexical items can be complex (BE going to [even when reduced to BE gonna], and
strawberry, moveable) or atomic (cf. -s ‘plural’, must, and lord, garlic). As mentioned
in the preceding section, the notion of an ‘inventory’ has affinities with that of the
constructicon. But the constructicon is not an undifferentiated list. Rather it is a
network of hierarchized form-meaning pairings, some of them schematic, some
atomic, some with primarily procedural, grammatical characteristics, and some
with primarily contentful, lexical ones.
One of the most important aspects of the constructional approach to lexical
change is that, because it embraces schemas as well as micro-constructions, it allows
us to consider word-formation and the creation of idioms, and so pay attention to
schematic patterns and not only idiosyncratic aspects of the development of con-
tentful expressions. The rise, persistence and loss of schematic word-formation
patterns involves changes in productivity, schematicity, and compositionality.
These are discussed in the next section.
4.4 Changing productivity, schematicity, and compositionality

in lexical constructionalization
As discussed in chapter 3.3, directionality in constructional change has been concep-
tualized in terms of variation in the productivity, schematicity and compositionality
of a construction. In his 2004 paper on lexicalization and grammaticalization, and the
commonalities they share (in that they start out from spontaneous and productive
combinations and are similar processes of conventionalization), Himmelmann
(2004: 43) recognizes that there may be some expansion in lexicalization, specifically
metaphorical extension of meaning. But since he views lexicalization primarily as
univerbation, he identifies reduction in host-classes and loss of generality in meaning
(specification of meaning) as typical of lexicalization (pp. 35–36). Building on Him-
melmann (2004) and Brinton and Traugott (2005), both of which conceptualize
lexicalization as reduction, in earlier work on constructionalization, Trousdale
(2008b, c, 2010, 2012a), suggested the following differences between grammatical
and lexical constructionalization:
(a) Grammatical constructionalization involves increase in productivity and sche-

maticity, but decrease in compositionality.
(b) Lexical constructionalization involves decrease in all three areas.
As we will show in the remainder of this chapter, Trousdale’s earlier view was
correct for lexicalization defined as reduction (LR), but incorrect for lexical con-
structionalization in the model of change that we argue for here. Particularly, as
hinted at in section 4.2, where the notion of morphological schemas was introduced,
it is important to recognize that the constructionalization of lexical schemas involves
increase in schematicity and productivity. When word-formation patterns arise there
is increase in schematicity. Word-formation patterns may be high or low in product-
ivity, but as long as they continue as to be used as schemas on which new words are
patterned, there is always some productivity and lexical expansion (LE). This expan-
sion occurs in word-formation at the schema level. Loss of compositionality is an
issue in cases where particular members of a schema lose their association with the
schema and undergo reductions of various kinds, especially morpheme boundary
loss. LR occurs at the level of individual constructions. In this section, we lay out the
central issues concerning directionality in the creation of lexical constructions, and in
sections 4.5 and 4.6, examine the development of schematic and atomic and lexical
constructions respectively in more detail.
4.4.1 Productivity
The issue of productivity in the development of lexical constructions is possibly one
of the clearest ways in which the constructional approach adopted in this book differs
from traditional accounts of lexicalization. Bauer and Huddleston (2002: 1629) see
synchronic lexicalization as the ‘converse’ of productivity because they consider
lexicalized words to be frozen forms that were once analyzable but are no longer
so. Our constructional approach focuses on change not synchrony, and recognizes
that some new lexical micro-constructions may be assembled into schemas (see next
section) and may to different degrees be the product of newly productive schemas.
Consider first the case of compounding, and the creation of new nominal (refer-
ring) lexical constructions. Endocentric compounds are organized in terms of a
default inheritance network. For example, a linguistics|society is a kind of ‘society’;
a student|linguistics|society is a kind of ‘linguistics society’, a black|board is a kind
of board, a bullet|hole is a kind of hole, a rattle|snake a kind of snake, and so on
(cf. section 4.2 above).10 In each case, the modifying element gives further specifica-
tion in relation to the determinatum, but the general properties are inherited from
the most general concept downwards.
10
English spelling is notoriously inconsistent with respect to treating compounds as separate words,
hyphenated words, or as a single word. Differences may reflect length of use, prescriptivism, or other
factors, but are independent of form-meaning pairing.
This is not the case with exocentric compounds: a dread|nought is not a kind of
nought or dread but a kind of battleship, and a big|head (‘person who thinks too
highly of him-/herself ’) is neither a head nor big. The idiosyncrasies associated with
the exocentric schema (note, the schema, not the various instances) mean that the
schema does not in PDE lend itself to productivity to the degree that the endocentric
compounding schema does. There may therefore be considerable difference in degree
of productivity depending on the internal organization of the schema.
As for affixoids like -able, -dom, in a constructional model—like the compounding
schemas discussed above—these too form schemas with a stem. As will be shown in
sections 4.5 and 4.6, we see the notion of the morphological schema (Booij 2010, 2013)
as critical for an understanding of the development of both complex and atomic
lexical constructions. The schemas allow us to track the development of a free form to
a determinatum in a compound, to an affixoid, to an affix, and beyond.
4.4.2 Schematicity
Schemas can either grow or contract in lexical constructionalization. In some cases,
a new word-formation (sub)schema comes into being as a result of lexical
constructionalization—here schematicity has increased, and slots have developed.
By contrast, when an existing word-formation (sub)schema becomes unproductive,
isolating particular instances many of which may fall into disuse, formal changes
(such as fusion and coalescence) may occur. An example of this is the development of
modern English forms such as buxom and lissome, which became isolated from the
less productive [[X-some] $ [‘characterized by X’]] schema, and underwent seman-
tic change (buxom is no longer associated with bending (cf. OE bugan)).
In the case of schema-development, the word-formation schema serves as an
attractor set for the production of new contentful constructions and expansion
occurs. An example is the development of the suffix. gate to refer to some sort of
scandal (Booij 2010: 90).11 The original micro-construction was Watergate, and Booij
suggests that early coinings may be based on analogy to that form. The OED (gate, 9.
comb. form) records forms such as Volgagate, Dallasgate and Koreagate, all referring
to a scandal, from as early as 1973. Booij (2010: 90) suggests that the establishment of a
set of related forms may lead the language user to produce a (sub)schema that
sanctions further new constructions. This new schema is a new word-formation
pattern that serves as an abstract template above and beyond analogization to
particular exemplars. It may be considered to be a case of the constructionalization
of a (sub)schema.
11
In 1972 the Republican Nixon administration in the USA attempted to cover up a break-in at the
Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., an
event known as ‘the Watergate scandal’.
Patterns are not only created, they are also lost or lose members. Detachment from
a (sub)schema may result in the neoanalysis of form and meaning. For instance,
many compounds are formed with an adjective as the determinant and a noun as the
determinatum (e.g. blackboard and bighead). One such adjective which has been used
as the determinant in compounds is holy. In many cases, such compounds are
relatively transparent, although conventional (e.g. holy|water); in other cases how-
ever, the schema no longer applies, and the particular instances are treated not as
compounds, but as monomorphemes (e.g. halibut < halig|butte ‘holy|flatfish’; holiday
< halig|dæg ‘holy|day’). In these cases a second constructionalization has occurred,
where both form and meaning change as a result of LR, as will be more fully
discussed in section 4.6.
4.4.3 Compositionality
The development of lexical schemas is intimately connected not only with productiv-
ity and schematicity, but also with compositionality. Questions about the composition-
ality of apparently syntactic strings was a major impetus for work on constructions,
going back to the 1980s (e.g. Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor 1988). As Nunberg, Sag, and
Wasow (1994) showed, certain idioms are non-compositional with respect to the
distribution of the meaning of the whole across the meaning of the parts. Some of
these idioms have a procedural function (e.g. in fact, indeed); some have contentful
semantics (e.g. kith and kin (Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor 1988)). As in work in
cognitive linguistics more generally, Taylor suggests that:
[s]trict compositionality is rarely, if ever, encountered. Most expressions (I am tempted to say:
all expressions), when interpreted in the context in which they are uttered, are non-compos-
itional to some degree. (Taylor 2002: 550, emphasis original)
The existence of a gradient is demonstrable by considering instances from the

same subschema. For example, spring|water means ‘water from a spring’, but toilet|
water may mean ‘scented liquid’, not ‘water from a toilet’. Issues of inheritance and
overrides (see 4.2 above) come into play here. The conventional meaning of the
subschema [[X|water] $ [‘water in or from X’]], as in bath|water, tap|water and
spring|water is overridden in particular cases like toilet|water ‘perfume’ and tonic|
water ‘carbonated beverage flavoured with quinine’. An interesting case of degrees of
compositionality is provided by [parts of X] and [X-parts]. Both parts of the body and
body|parts exist, but they do not mean the same thing. Parts of the body is compos-
itional, and refers to entities that can be found by police in fridges, dumpsters, and
woods. These may or may not be body|parts. Body|parts are names of many parts of
the body (e.g. legs, arms, head), but not all (e.g. hair) when construed as part of a
whole body. Nevertheless, some parts of the body that one could name are not
(usually) referred to as body|parts (e.g. under|arm) (Zwicky 2012). Body|parts is
therefore less compositional than parts of the body. A different situation occurs in the
case of parts of speech. This is a phrase with [parts of X] structure, but a considerably
less compositional meaning than parts of the body, since speech is not obviously
partitioned into e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives. In this case there is no *speech|parts
equivalent.12 The asymmetry between the two examples here may in part have arisen
because parts of speech is a metalinguistic term used and entrenched primarily among
language-users concerned with grammars and linguistic research. Speech|parts used
with reference to expressions belonging to certain grammatical categories seems
comical because it assumes referent is familiar and well known. The tradename
SpeechParts for educational software featuring instruction in language arts presum-
ably draws on this implicature of familiarity and fame.
Consistent with other aspects of constructional change espoused in this book, we
propose that the synchronic gradient of compositionality is a consequence of grad-
ualness in the development of new micro-construction and schemas, even though the
micro-changes themselves are discrete.
There are some cases of lexical constructionalization in which compositionality
unambiguously decreases. These are cases where a simplex/atomic micro-construc-
tion is created as a result of a series of neoanalyses such that the new node is no
longer associated with a complex schema. This is discussed in detail in section 4.6
below; here we simply observe that while a compound such as OE gar|leac ‘spear|leek’
may be at least partly motivated in the sense of de Saussure (1959[1916]) by virtue of
its being associated with a subschema [[X|leac] $ [‘leek with features associated with
X’]], no such motivation exists with garlic. For contemporary speakers of the
language, garlic, like paper and dog, must be learned as a non-compositional unit.
We suggest that where lexical constructionalization can be construed as LR, compo-
sitionality decreases.
The issue of compositionality is also relevant in cases of instantaneous type node
creation, such as word-formations like conversions e.g. to window (drawing on a
schema that ‘converts’ a noun into a verb, or a verb into a noun, etc.) (see section 4.8).
As Clark and Clark (1979) have observed, in the case of conversions, the existence of a
schema (with a conventional meaning, however general) is insufficient to provide the
meaning of the newly created micro-construction. Thus the verb dust may mean ‘to
remove dust’ (he dusted the bookshelf ) or ‘to add something akin to dust’ (he dusted
the birthday cake, she dusted for fingerprints); the verb google means ‘to search for
something on the internet’, typically though not necessarily via Google:
(4) This cartoon was one of the first hits when I Googled “hegemony” on Yahoo.
(http://bcbrooks.blogspot.co.uk/2010_10_01_archive.html; accessed 20 Novem-
ber 2012)
12
Thanks to Francesca Masini for this example.
On the other hand, the verb facebook means ‘to contact someone via facebook’. Novel
micro-constructions like these are contentful, and denote event processes. As such
they are lexical micro-constructions. But any compositional meaning which we
might infer in such a case derives from the structures from which it inherits.
In the next two sections we show how lexical (sub)schemas can arise, specifically
word-formation strategies for the creation of abstract nominals (4.5). This is an
example of how derivational word-formation can be seen as constructionalization
and constructional expansion. Then we show how atomic lexical constructions may
arise out of compounds and derivational word-formations (4.6). Many of these are
also constructionalizations, but unlike the first set of changes, they involve loss. The
emergence of atomic lexical constructions from complex ones is what is traditionally
known as lexicalization.
4.5 The development of lexical (sub)schemas

Here we consider the emergence of subschemas of compounds and their subsequent
development. Since a general schema for compounding has been attested since the
time of the earliest English documents, we will not be discussing the development of
compounding here.
In OE poetry noun-noun compounds of varying degrees of compositionality are
found. All differ from phrasal use because there is no morphological case showing
the relationship between the two nouns, and they typically appear to have a more
restricted meaning than the freer phrase, although this is harder to assess. There are
several examples of compounds in Cædmon’s Hymn, a poem apparently composed
in the late seventh century and cited by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History (dated 731).
Bede translated the poem into Latin, but there are various manuscript versions in
OE. Among compounds are: heofon|ric ‘heaven|kingdom, heavenly kingdom’, wuldor|
fæder ‘glory|father, God’, monn|cynn ‘man|kin, mankind’. In each case the first N in the
phrasal version would have been marked by genitive case in a phrase (heofen.es rice,
wuldr.es fæder, monn.es cynn), so we know that heofonric, wuldorfæder, and monncynn
are formally compounds; they appear to have a more particularized meaning as well. In
some cases both the phrase and a compound may appear in the same text. For example,
Broz (2011: 116) cites eorl.a gestreon ‘earls.GEN treasure’ and eorl|gestreon ‘earl|treasure’
in Beowulf lines 3163 and 2244 respectively. These nominal compounds are endocentric
and in each case N1 specifies N2. They are constructions based on a schema of the type
in (5) (where R means ‘relation’) (based on Booij 2010: 17):13
(5) [[[N]Nk [N]i]Nj $ [[SEMi with type-R to SEMk]ENTITY]j]
13
This is to be read as follows: a formal compound Nk + Ni (where k, i are indexed to the meaning) is
associated with a meaning SEMi of Ni to which SEMk of Nk is related.
In other compounds the meaning may be totally non-compositional and figurative

(such compounds are known as ‘kennings’).14 Well-known examples from Beowulf
are ban|hus ‘bone|house, body’ (l. 2508), guð|wine ‘war|friend, sword’ (l. 1810),
woruld|candel ‘world|lantern, sun’ (l. 1965). Many of the examples are hapax lego-
mena. To the extent that these compounds were conventionalized they illustrate
constructionalization of micro-constructions.
We can conclude that in these cases there was a very general NN compounding
schema with no clearly identifiable subschemas consisting of several related con-
struction-types. However, in other cases we can observe the rise of subschemas out of
compound micro-constructions: the second noun becomes the host for a productive
set of stems. What enables this shift from an individual compound micro-construc-
tion, e.g. martyr|dom ‘martyrdom’ to a productive (sub)schema is increase in type
frequency correlated with semantic generalization (Trips 2009: 245) and affixoiding.
Since a formnew-meaningnew complex (sub)schema has arisen through a series of
changes, this is lexical constructionalization at the schematic level. The subsequent
history of the fixed element (formerly the second noun, e.g. dom ‘judgment, condi-
tion’, had ‘rank, condition’) in such subschemas ranges from relatively high product-
ivity with respect to the stem (e.g. -hood) ultimately to obsolescence. Sometimes there
is retention of the original lexical item. For example, doom is still an independent
word in English, with a more restricted meaning than in earlier times (‘bad fate’
rather than ‘judgment’). In other cases it does not. For example, OE had ‘condition’,
did not survive as an independent lexical item.15
Hood and dom came to be used productively enough to be considered to be
affixoidal derivational word-formations in ME that retain some, but not all, of their
meaning. Recall that affixoids
have become similar to affixes in having a specialized meaning when embedded in compounds.
They are not yet affixes because they correspond to lexemes, that is, unbound forms, but their
meaning differs from that when used as independent lexemes. (Booij 2010: 57)
The meaning change is minimal, and since the degree of bondedness does not
appear to change, we consider affixoiding to be a post-constructionalization lexical
constructional change at the micro-constructional level. However, when a new word-
formation (sub)schema arises, enabled by the generalization of the meaning, there is
constructionalization at the level of the schema.
Exactly when a particular element in a compound micro-construction comes to be
an affixoid and when an affixoid becomes a suffix is often debatable. For example,
writing about OE derivational forms Kastovsky (1992: 386–387) draws attention to
14
Broz (2011) analyzes kennings in terms of Geeraerts’s (2002) approach to syntagmatic and paradig-
matic aspects of form and meaning in compounds and idioms.
15
‘Hood is a clipping of neighborhood with affixal .hood.
arguments about whether the OE noun had ‘state, rank, condition’ forms a compound
or a suffix. In this chapter we do not attempt to identify exact points at which the changes
occurred—this would be impossible given the sparsity of data. The data and the
diachronic account of that data in this section generalize over details and draw heavily
on Haselow (2011) for OE and the first period of ME, and Dalton-Puffer (1996) for all
of ME. Details of ratios of types to tokens in the data bases they used are provided by
both authors.16 We have recast aspects of the discussion in the literature in construct-
ional terms. In these terms, evidence for constructionalization of a (sub)schema is
provided by the attestation of significant increases in type-constructions.
4.5.1 OE dom
Our first example concerns the use of the OE lexical micro-construction [[dom] $
[‘doom, judgment, authority to judge’]] in compounds and its subsequent history. As
Haselow (2011) observes, the history of dom in English is a complex one. Its complexity
illustrates nicely the gradient properties of constructions at particular synchronic
stages, the gradual nature of the development of new patterns, and the fact that
constructionalization can occur at the levels of both micro-constructions and schemas.
Historically a noun with a long vowel, even in the OE period dom regularly
occurred as the right (‘determinatum’) element of a compound, and
progressively changed its status into that of a suffix by adopting a more abstract, categorical
meaning and undergoing phonological reduction. It is therefore difficult to determine a cut-off
point which separates formations with dom being compounds from those being genuine
derivatives. (Haselow 2011: 112)
The following examples illustrate dom used as a noun (6a) and as a determinatum in
a compound in (6b):
(6) a. for ðam ðe hit is Godes dom
for that that it is God.GEN law.NOM
‘because it is God’s law’ (Deut (c1000 OE Heptateuch) B 8. 1.4.5 [DOEC])
b. for ðan þe he æfter cristes þrowunge ærest
for that that he after Christ.GEN suffering first
martyr|dom geðrowade
martyr|dom suffered
‘because he was the first to suffer martyrdom after Christ’s suffering’ (c1000
ÆCHom I.3 [DOEC])
There is clearly a dependency relationship between X and dom in these examples.
In (6a) it is syntactic (see .es genitive) and in (6b) it is a word-formation
16
An important additional resource is Trips (2009), which unfortunately came to our attention too late
to be incorporated extensively. Trips’s study encompasses ModE as well as the earlier periods.
determinant-determinatum dependency (there is no case). However, in an example

like (7) it is not possible to tell the status of dom as freo would not have overt
case in a syntactic phrase here; nevertheless it seems plausible that there was a
dependency relation here too.
(7) Đæt is se freodom ðætte mon mot don ðæt
that is the freedom.NOM that man.NOM may.3S do.INF that
he wile.
he want.3SPres
‘That is freedom, that a man may do as he will’. (c890 Boethius B.9.3.2 [DOEC])
We posit that each new compound micro-construction with dom is to be con-
sidered a constructionalization. Although we have little access to the phonology,
from their subsequent history it is probable that a phonological doublet arose
between an independent form with a stressed (long) vowel, the source of ModE
doom, and a less stressed vowel which in the ME period was reduced to schwa, the
source of the ModE .dom. We may note that the eventual development of e.g.
Christendom,17 freedom are examples of what Lehmann (2002) would presumably
call lexicalization, but it does not show ‘obliteration of boundaries’ since .dom and the
stems are still analyzable.
As the examples show, the first element of a compound in dom OE could be either
an adjective (freodom) or a noun (martyrdom). Dietz (2007) suggests that ‘suffix-like’
(what we call ‘affixoid-like’) functions of -dom are attested with adjectives around the
year 900 and some fifty years later with nouns denoting attributes of persons, e.g.
martyr-dom ‘martyrdom’, þeow-dom ‘servitude’. He notes that about two thousand
tokens of the noun dom appear in OE, and about fifty types with apparent ‘affixal’
(our ‘affixoidal’) -dom. Of these wis-dom is the most frequent (over nine hundred
tokens). In his more limited OE corpus Haselow (2011: 154) finds twenty-two types.
Compared to the two hundred and twenty types with the affix .ness ‘quality of ’ that
he finds in the same corpus (p. 161), Haselow considers this to be low type frequency
and concludes that a dom schema was not especially well entrenched. Rather, the
high token frequency relates to individual micro-constructions like wisdom ‘wisdom’,
cristendom ‘christianity’ and martyrdom ‘martyrdom’: ‘the occurrence of -dom as the
second element in compounds was restricted to a small number of highly frequent
formations’ (Haselow 2011: 152).
While the OE noun dom has a range of meanings including, but not limited to,
‘doom’, ‘dignity’, ‘power’, and ‘choice’, the central meaning in terms of the develop-
ment of the affixoidal schema (and subsequently the affix) is ‘state’ or ‘condition’,
as in (8):
17
Christendom is now understood as a geopolitical term; in OE it referred mainly to Christianity, i.e.
belief. The change is a semantic constructional change.
(8) Hi on dryhtlicestum dome lifdon.

they in lord-like.SUPER.DAT condition.DAT lived
‘They lived in a most lord-like condition’. (Seafarer 85 [DOEC; Haselow 2011: 75])
It is relevant here that the most general meaning is the one that is central for
affixoiding and the development of the word-formation schema; compare (8),
where it means ‘condition’, with (6a) above, where it means ‘law’.
This is a distributional expansion typical of gradual developments. Members of
this subset have affixoidal morphology [X-dom] and the meaning is restricted (with
nominals it is to abstract ‘condition’, with adjectives to ‘quality’, see Dalton-Puffer
1996: 77). Generalizing over gradual changes, and limiting ourselves to nominal
constructions, we suggest that by the end of the tenth century an affixoidal sub-
schema of the compound construction had arisen, as in (9):
(9) [[[X]Nk [-dom]i]Nj $ [[conditioni with relation R to SEMk]ENTITY]j]
Note that the development of a schematic pattern with the affixoid -dom is con-
sidered to be a constructionalization at the schematic level resulting from speakers
generalizing over individual micro-constructions and abducing a pattern.18
As mentioned in 4.3.3, both Haselow and Booij have suggested that the development
of dom is a case of grammaticalization. However, there does not appear to be develop-
ment of any procedural or deictic function; rather we see the creation of abstract
but contentful semantics associated with referring constructions, albeit abstract ones.
Crucially, the output construction—the lexical schema—is precisely that, a schema
which sanctions new referring constructions, not new procedural constructions.
In the later history of dom, we observe further patterns that are consistent with
post-constructionalization constructional changes, in this case reorganization of the
schemas as -dom became further generalized semantically and reduced phonologic-
ally eventually giving rise to the affix .dom. The affixal status of .dom allowed the
schema to be reorganized and linked with the nominal derivational schemas. In the
later history of dom there was also loss of members of the schema. Dalton-Puffer
finds a small
array of fairly fixed expressions in frequent use without much spontaneous productivity
elsewhere . . . For both deadjectival and denominal formations the picture is one of stagnation
and eventual decline. (Dalton-Puffer 1996: 76)
This is host-class reduction and obsolescence, both constructional changes (see

further 4.6). Part of the reason for this host-class reduction, as we will see in 4.5.3,
is probably the relatively large set of choices in a neighbouring part of the network
18
‘Abduction’ refers to logical inference from data interpretation to a hypothesis accounting for the
data. It was introduced from logic into historical linguistics by Andersen (1973).
with other expressions that were developing as affixoids and suffixes, and that also
had a meaning similar to ‘state or condition’. For example, Haselow (2011: 152) says that
in OE stems with -dom often had ‘parallel forms’ or variants with had, scipe, and
ness, usually with little difference in meaning.19 An exception is woh|dom ‘misjudg-
ment’ ~ woh.ness ‘perfidy’. Furthermore, its weak generative power (the low type
frequency that Haselow (p. 154) observes throughout the period) may have contributed
to its type frequency remaining constant in the OE and ME subperiods.
4.5.2 OE ræden
There were two other OE micro-constructions with a meaning ‘condition’, like dom:
scipe and ræden. Scipe (originally a noun meaning ‘condition, state, office’, but
appearing only as an affixoid/suffix in OE, see OED and Bosworth-Toller) was better
established as a productive part of a word-formation pattern than either dom or
ræden. While Haselow (2011: 166) regards scipe as a suffix in words like freondscipe
‘friendship’, we consider it to be an affixoid. It fulfils Booij’s criterion for affixoidal
status because there is a corresponding cognate lexical verb scyppan ‘to create’ (see
German schaffen ‘shape, create’). It occurs with a handful of adjective bases, but
prototypically the schema is nominal as in (10):
(10) [[[X]Nk [-scipe]i]nj $ [[conditioni with relation R to SEMk]ENTITY]j]
By contrast, ræden was not an affixoid in OE, but rather formed compounds
referring to the judicial sphere, or particular social relations. Examples provided by
Haselow (2011: 165) for the judicial sphere include burh|ræden ‘civil|right’ and mann|
ræden ‘man|contract, service’, and for social relations feond|ræden ‘enmity’, freond|
ræden ‘friendship’.
As an independent lexical item ræden is very rare, and used mainly as a gloss for
Latin conditio ‘condition’, though some other examples are attested, as in (11):
(11) hæfdon . . . sume mid aþum gefæstnod, þæt hi on hyre
had . . . some with oaths secured, that they in their
rædenne beon woldon.
service be would
‘had made some swear that they would be in service to them’. (918 Chron C
[DOEC])
More critically for this discussion, the existence of derived forms like un.ræden ‘ill-
advised action’ and sam.ræden ‘harmonious living together’ is diagnostic of the
19
.ness is etymologically not a noun, and appears to have been an affix from OE on. The kind of
variation posited here at this period between elements that are affixoids (-dom) or affixes (.ness) suggests
that speakers may have had little awareness of the fine distinctions made here between affixoiding and
affixing.
existence of an independent lexical item, as suffixes cannot be the base for derivation
(Dietz 2007: 142).
Thus in the OE period there existed an independent form ræden with a range of
meanings, such as ‘condition, estimation, rule’ (Haselow 2011: 164), and a determi-
natum in a compound. When compound micro-constructions in |ræden developed,
these were constructionalizations: there is still semantic compositionality, but a
degree of conventionality is associated with the use of the schema to refer to judicial
matters. Dietz (2007: 143, 146) suggests that the development of compounds with
stems referring to social relations may have been the entry-point for ‘suffixation’,
with further generalization of meaning. This was probably a brief stage of affixoiding
enabling the constructionalization of a subschema of the compounding construction,
since the entire compound is abstract. The new subschema is represented in (12):
(12) [[[X]Nk [-ræden]i]Nj $ [[conditioni with relation R to SEMk]ENTITY]j]
The new derivational affixoids sanctioned by the schema in (12) have strong
functional overlaps with -scipe and .ness. The latter is exemplified in:
(13) Do eac swa se cristena mann beo him unscæðþig
do also as the Christian man be he.DAT unharming
& bylewite & lufige an.nysse & broðor-rædene
and humble and love oneness and brotherhood
‘Do also as the Christian man, be unharmful to him, and humble and love
unity, and brotherhood’. (c1000 ÆCHom I.xi. [DOEC])20
At this point we have host-class expansion but the productivity of the schema is
weak, possibly because of the number of other schemas in the network with similar
meaning, as discussed in the next section. In fact, in ME -rede (< -ræden) is extremely
limited (Dalton-Puffer 1996 finds only four types in the Helsinki data). The obsoles-
cence of (12) as a word-formation schema isolated particular micro-constructions
and in PDE there are now only two relics: kindred, and hatred.
The discussion of the use of -dom and -ræden as affixoids has focused on the
development of lexical schemas. We have proposed that in the cases discussed:
(a) Initially compound constructs are conventionalized and constructionalized as
micro-construction types (e.g. freodom, martyrdom, freondræden).
(b) Gradually the second element of the compound may become an affixoid with
bleached and abstract meaning; and a template abduced by generalization over
micro-construction-types arises. This is constructionalization of a subschema,
which is followed by productive addition of compounds to the subschema.
20
DOEC records several prosody markings in this passage. They have been deleted to avoid confusion
with the morphological notation.
As we show in section 4.6 affixoidal micro-constructions sanctioned by a sub-

schema may be reduced to atomic micro-constructions; this is a formal construc-
tional change. Furthermore, as we argue in 4.8, the specific micro-constructions that
are sanctioned by the rise of schemas such as the affixoiding schema and the -dom
and -ræden subschemas occur instantaneously once a (sub)schema has come into
being, e.g. ADJ wis ‘wise’ + dom was presumably created instantaneously as a full-
fledged N, just as blog + er recently became a N referring to someone who blogs,
instantaneously without intermediate, gradual changes. However, the (sub)schemas
themselves arise gradually.
In the next section we show that templates with the affixoids -dom and -ræden,
both of which sanctioned word-formation of nominals with the abstract meaning
‘condition’ were only part of a set of schemas with similar meaning. The wealth of
choices may have resulted in changes in the productivity of the subschemas.
4.5.3 Choices among nominal affixoids in OE and ME

As discussed at some length by Dalton-Puffer (1996), Trips (2009), and to some
extent by Haselow (2011), the histories of derivational affixes cannot be understood
by themselves. In OE -dom was only one of a larger set of abstract nominal
derivational affixoids. Others were -scipe, -had, and -lac. There were also suffixes
without lexical sources such as .ness, .th, and .ung. In ME additionally there were
-rede (< -ræden) and borrowings from French. Dalton-Puffer discusses, among
others, .(a)cioun, .acy, .age, .aunce, .erie, .ite, .ment, all of which were used with
different degrees of productivity and with different bases to form abstract nouns, e.g.
devotion, conspiracy, marriage, vengeance, robbery, curiosity, and commencement (in
their modern spellings) respectively.
The main choices21 in ME among abstract nominal affixoids appears to have been
between -dom, -rede, -ship (< -scipe), and -had (ME -hede). All were originally
relational nouns (Trips 2009: 201) referring to the office, rank, state, or condition
of the base X. Over time they came to be restricted to nominal bases ‘predominantly
denoting persons’ (p. 204), such as frend ‘friend’. They had variable affinities with
adjective bases as well. Dalton-Puffer (1996: 257–258) shows that only these affixoids
(and the borrowing -ite ‘-ity’, which is not discussed here as it had mainly adjectival
bases) mapped onto collectives with the meaning ‘entity denoting a state or condi-
tion, being, or essence’. Given its already low type frequency, -rede appears to have
been the first to decline. The trajectory is typical: a subschema with low type
frequency and low token frequency is substituted by more productive suffixes.
For example brother-redde, which alternated already in OE with -scipe as in
21
We prefer the term ‘choice’ to a more frequently used term ‘competition’, on grounds that ‘choice’ is a
usage-based concept, whereas ‘competition’ suggests that constructions have a life of their own independ-
ent of speakers.
broþor-ræden ~ broþor-scipe ‘brotherhood’, was replaced by brother-hood; freond-

ræden, which alternated with freond-scipe, was replaced by it (Haselow 2011: 165).
The origin of hede is debated. Because -hede is preferred with adjectives while OE -had
is preferred with nouns, a direct source in the noun had is not universally accepted.
However, Dalton-Puffer (1996: 78) notes that while .ness occurs with verb bases in earlier
ME, it is productive almost exclusively with adjectives by later ME. She concludes that
-hede is in all likelihood related to the noun had ‘degree, rank, condition, state’ (cf. German
-heit), and we agree. In OE -had alternated with -dom, as in cyne-had ~ cyne-dom
‘dominion, power of the king’. In ME we find mainly -hede, which increased in type
frequency throughout ME but was eventually replaced by -hood, cf. knyght-hede ~ knight-
hood, man-hede ~ man-hood. Only a few forms in -head remain. According to the OED
(head, -head suffix), they are ‘e.g. godhead, maidenhead (distinguished from godhood,
maidenhood)’. While -head obsolesced, -hood became an affix and very productive:
Being a living suffix, -hood can be affixed at will to almost any word denoting a person or
concrete thing, and to many adjectives, to express condition or state, so that the number of
these derivatives is indefinite. Nonce-formations are numerous. (OED hood 5)
Scipe with personal bases means ‘state, condition’, as in OE leodscipe ‘a people,

nation’, friendship, kinship. Dalton-Puffer (1996: 86–87) notes that it was stable
throughout ME, and that formations tend to be rather transparent (compositional).
It is frequently used in PDE with routinized respectful designations (your ladyship,
Master of Artship) but the only productive use (as an affix in PDE) is with bases
denoting a professional agent (penman.ship, stateman.ship) (Marchand 1969:
345–346). As these examples attest, the base is usually complex with -man.
As far as dom is concerned, it declined in type frequency during ME but is still
alive (as an affix). Marchand (1969: 263) notes that it was used with ‘a pronounced
pejorative character’ from about 1800 on. Examples include bumble.dom, gangster.
dom, and official.dom. This is confirmed by Trips (2009), who provides evidence that
.dom in the meaning ‘realm of ’ is still relatively productive in PDE and cites several
hapaxes from BNC (p. 119), many of them with pejorative bases, e.g. hack.dom,
tramp.dom, slob.dom. She also notes a recent tendency to combine older forms in
.dom with prefixes like anti., post., quasi., as in semi.star.dom, quasi.free.dom.
In sum, if we consider only the four affixoids mentioned here, ignoring other
derivational morphemes available to form abstract Ns such as .ness, as well as the
development of abstract Ns with adjective bases, we get the picture in Table 4.2 of
type robustness.22
All but the first continue to be used as affixes, with .hood now dominant in this set.
Dalton-Puffer (1996: 125) suggests that their co-survival may have been supported by
a partial of division of semantic labour in ME:
22
In Table 4.2 mtf stands for ‘moderately type frequent’, tf for ‘type frequent’, obs for ‘obsolescing’.
TABLE 4.2. Relative frequency of four affixoids

OE ME ModE
-ræden rare obs —

-scipe mtf mtf mtf
-dom tf mtf mtf
-had mtf -hede mtf -hood tf
(14) ship: ‘social status of N’

dom: ‘jurisdiction of a N, territory of a N’
hede: ‘abstract or inner qualities making up a N’
Over time these restrictions have been relaxed.
4.6 The development of atomic lexical constructions

In this section we discuss particular examples of new atomic lexical constructions
arising out of former complex micro-constructions. Most are lexical constructiona-
lizations at the micro-construction level involving change in meanings as well as
form (as we have seen, constructionalization may recur), but a few are constructional
changes involving reduction of form only. Recall that atomic constructions are
contrasted with complex constructions in that the former are non-compositional.
However, we will see that the development of atomic lexical constructions is gradual
and that synchronically there is a gradient from more to less compositional.
The developments discussed here are of the type often cited in traditional accounts
of lexicalization, largely because of the following:
(a) A dependency relationship that existed between two items (the base and the
derivation) is obliterated (cf. Lehmann 2002).
(b) The two elements of a construction, whether schematic or specific, are
coalesced, and the phonological boundary between the two forms is erased,
leading to fusion.
(c) There is loss of accessible figurative meaning.
(d) The output of the process is an unanalyzable whole that has to be independ-
ently learned by the language user.
We discuss a number of cases where words that historically may have been associated
with a relatively compositional schema such as (9) for -dom and (12) for -ræden come
to be non-compositional. We have already mentioned that with the obsolescence of
-ræden only two etymologically original forms survived into PDE: kindred and
hatred. These are now noncompositional atomic referring micro-constructions that
are relics from the loss of the subschema that sanctioned them.
Typically, dissociation from a subschema is gradual, in the sense that one type after
another either ceases to be used or is neoanalyzed in such a way that it no longer
conforms to the partially open slots of the schema. Dalton-Puffer (1996) points out
that although the denominal schemas with -dom, -hede, and -scipe discussed in the
preceding section remained relatively compositional (and schematic), some of the
members of the deadjectival schemas with the same derivational affixes are more
subject to reduction, notably wisdom (not *wisedom), and worship (< worth ‘worth’A
+ -scipe). These became separated from their schemas, perhaps owing to token
frequent use.
In some cases the gradualness of historical disassociation from a schema is
reflected in PDE gradience. We illustrate this with the development of the suffix
.lian from OE to .le in EModE. In some cases a verb base came to be used with .le after
the OE period (e.g. crump, wrig), in some cases a suffix has been neoanalyzed as part
of the stem (with accompanying change in meaning) and relationship within the
schema has been lost. Examples in (15) illustrate a contemporary gradient from an
earlier partially compositional schema (suggested by the morphological structure of
OE hand.lian) to contemporary atomic and less compositional micro-constructions
(nestle, dazzle):
(15) OE hand.lian ‘touch with hands’ > handle
OE twinc.lian ‘shine repeatedly with intermittent light’ (cf. OE *twinc- ‘wink’)
> twinkle
EModE *wrig ‘to twist’ > wriggle
OE wræst.lian ‘grapple (repeatedly) in order to overpower’ (cf. OE wræstan
‘twist’ > ModE wrest) > wrestle
EModE fond.le ‘treat with fondness’ > fondle
ME *crump ‘to draw into a coil, crush’ > crumple
OE nest.lian ‘make a nest’ > nestle
ME daze ‘to stun’ > dazzle
In OE, we hypothesise, a schema such as (16) was available to speakers:
(16) [[[Xstem]i -lian]Vj $ [[repeatedly SEMi]PROCESS]j]
Various systemic constructional changes affected the shape of the suffix, notably
reduction of unstressed vowels in OE, loss of final -n in infinitives in ME, etc. These
were post-constructionalization constructional changes, affecting all verbs. In some
cases .le has retained its iterative meaning. For example, Marchand (1969: 332)
characterizes it as denoting quick, rapid, repetition of small movements, often
associated with sound. Examples in (17) include at least twinkle and wriggle. In
virtually all cases, access to the stem became lost. As the * shows, the stem is not
always attested as an independent form even in OE. In PDE even if an etymologically
cognate independent form does exist, it is unlikely that most speakers connect the
V.le forms with it. They are unlikely to connect nestle /nɛsl/ with nest /nɛst/, unless
they are strongly influenced by the spelling, probably even less likely to connect
dazzle with daze. The stem and the suffix have coalesced (a morphosyntactic
neoanalysis with accompanying changes in meaning) resulting in new conventional
semantics (nestle in one of its senses, e.g. in nestle against, has no iterative meaning,
for instance), in other words, there has been lexical constructionalization in all
cases—all need to be learned.
Cases like twinkle and dazzle may be considered to involve ‘cranberry’ mor-
phemes: morphemes that combine with a recognizable element but that have no
synchronically accessible free variant like cran- in cranberry (cran- is related to Low
German Kraan ‘crane’). In many cases of cranberry morphemes a compound may
have been the source. Examples of such developments are given in (17) (the com-
pound notation | is used only for the source form):
(17) OE were|wulf ‘?man wolf ’ > ModE werewolf
ME bone|fyre ‘bone fire’ > ModE bonfire
Gmc *ahwa|land ‘watery land’> OE ig|land > ME iland > ModE island
ME coppe|web ‘spider|web’ > ModE cobweb
In each case in (17) an original compound micro-construction with the form [X|N]
came to be used instead as a combination of a cranberry morpheme and a free
morpheme; they are instances of decrease in compositionality because of the un-
analyzable nature of the bound morpheme. We exemplify with the development
of bonfire.
In the late ME period, the compositional nature of the compound bone fire is clear
from the following example:
(18) In worshyppe of saynte Johan the people waked at
in worship of saint John the people awoke at
home, & made iij maner of fyres. One was clene
home and made three kinds of fire. One was clean
bones and noo woode, and that is called a bone fyre.
bones and no wood and that is called a bone fire
(1493 Festyvall (1515) OED, bonfire, n. 1)
In the EModE period, the term was used for a funeral pyre, or for any kind of
celebratory fire for a particular occasion, no longer necessarily involving the burning
of bone:
(19) Then doth the ioyfull feast of John the Baptist take his turne, When bonfiers
great with loftie flame, in euery towne doe burne.
‘Then the joyful feast of John the Baptist recurs, when large bonfires with high
flames burn in every town’. (1570 Googe tr. Kirchmeyer, Popish Kingdome iv,
OED, bonfire, n. 4a)
There are a number of micro-constructions which have fire as the second element
(e.g. log|fire, camp|fire), but in each case there continues to be greater composition-
ality than with bonfire, where the phonological changes to the first element
have resulted in a particular form peculiar to this compound. Each individual
micro-construction is an instance of a constructionalized affixoidal schema of the
type in (20):
(20) [[Xi-fire]Nj $ [[fire with relation R to SEMi]ENTITY]j]
However, this schema is hardly well entrenched, and highly diverse in terms of the
relation R between the first and second elements. For instance, in logfire, X is what
is burned; in campfire, X is the location of the fire. Yet the existence of the first
element as a recognizable independent lexeme in other contexts makes this particular
construction more compositional than the bonfire example.
In cases such as are illustrated in (15) and (17), a weak morpheme boundary may
still exist for many people. In yet other cases an original compound may be com-
pletely obscured by boundary loss, phonological, and meaning changes. Some
examples in the history of English nouns which typify this process appear in
(21) (again the morphological notation is used only for the earliest forms):
(21) Gmc. *alino ‘arm’|*bogon- ‘bending’ > OE elnboga > ModE elbow
OE gar|leac ‘spear leek’ > ME garleke > ModE garlic
OE daeg.es|eage ‘day’s eye’ > ME dayesye > ModE daisy
OE nos|thyrl ‘nose hole’ > ME nostrelle > ModE nostril
OE stig|rap ‘climb rope’ > ME stirope > ModE stirrup
OE scir|gerefa ‘shire reeve’ > ME schirrif > ModE sherrif
OE bere|ærn ‘barley place’ > ME bern > ModE barn
ME gose|somer ‘goose summer’ > ModE gossamer
Entries in (21) generalize over gradual changes affecting each micro-construction.
We illustrate with garlic.
A variety of constructions where leac ‘leek’ is the second element are attested in the
OE period (e.g. bradeleac ‘broad leek’, hwitleac ‘white leek’, cropleac ‘sprout
leek’), all of which referred to varieties of onion (OE leac; see further Anderson 2003:
394). The various relations may include the shape of the leaves (in the case of
garleac, the tapered leaves were figuratively construed as resembling spears), or
their position (e.g. in the case of cropleac). This suggests there was a very small
affixoidal subschema, an instance of which is illustrated by (22):
(22) Genim garleac þreo heafdu

take garlic three heads
‘Take three heads of garlic’ (Leechbook [DOEC])
By later ME we find:
(23) Wel loued he garlek (vrr. garleek, garlik, garlike), onions and eek leeks.
well loved he garlic, onions and also leeks
(1390s Chaucer, C. T. General Prologue [MED, garlek])
While the form leac ‘leak’ remains (as a specific kind of plant), compounds where
the second element is leac disappear, and the subschema is lost. Furthermore, there is
also loss of the micro-construction [[gar] $ [‘spear’]]. What is entrenched is the
micro-construction [[garlek] $ [‘garlic’]] as an instance not of the schema, but as an
instance of the most general referring construction (in traditional category terms, a
noun). It appears to have been constructionalized with an atomic form.
In the case of garlic, the following factors are relevant post-constructionalization:
(a) The form gar appears not to be attested beyond the ME period. (The last use
recorded by the OED is at the beginning of the fifteenth century.)
(b) Other instances of the X-leac schema do not survive beyond ME.
(c) Spelling variation (which potentially reveals phonological properties) reduces
over time; the last form attested in the OED as garleek appears in the
seventeenth century.
Lexical constructionalization of the kind discussed in this section is, as noted
above, in essence what is usually and traditionally thought of as lexicalization. It
involves loss—there has been loss of schematicity (indeed, loss of a schema), which
has entailed loss of type frequency at the schema level, and thus loss of productivity;
and there has been loss of compositionality as the form develops into an atomic
substantive construction.
Reduction in productivity, once it has set in, does not always lead to loss of a
schema. What may appear to have become unproductive may be revived. For
example, the deadjectival noun forming schema [ADJ.th]N $ [‘abstract entity’]
historically created the words warmth, health and breadth.23 This schema is opaque
(except in the case of the most frequent expression warmth) to the extent that it is
questionable that language users would consider this to be a productive schema;
certainly the bases are all cranberry morphemes. Yet forms like coolth (note, the
antonym of the most frequent form) and greenth are attested. Language users appear
23
For brevity’s sake, we ignore here the details of the Germanic /iθ/ suffixation, and the effects of
i-mutation on the quality of the vowel in the adjective (cf. broad-breadth).
to be able to look for potential patterns, impose analyzability on a relatively non-

compositional set, analogize on those patterns, and hypothesize a new schema.
In formal respects, such as coalescence, fusion, and gradual change, there are
similarities with grammatical constructional changes (see Brinton and Traugott 2005
on similarities between lexicalization and grammaticalization with respect to reduc-
tion, what we here call LR). From our perspective so far there are two main
differences between lexical and grammatical constructionalization (a third will be
mentioned in section 4.8). Most importantly, in lexical constructionalization the
outcome is contentful not procedural. Secondly, when constructionalization recurs,
there is usually no change in formal category. Constructions with -dom and -ræden
continued to be nouns through the various stages of constructionalization. In the case
of grammatical constructionalization, however, there is usually a change in syntactic
function. Preposition beside(s) was constructionalized as a subordinator and as a
pragmatic marker (see chapter 3.2.3). In the case of WHAT-pseudo-clefts, the
anaphoric, specificational first clause of a biclausal structure was neoanalyzed as a
cataphoric projector in a monoclausal structure.
4.7 Lexical constructionalization of clauses and phrases

Our main intention in this chapter has been to demonstrate that lexical constructio-
nalization involves the development of (sub)schemas that are productive. Only the
decay of productive (sub)schemas involves what has recently been identified as
‘lexicalization’ in the historical linguistic literature. Here we briefly mention further
evidence for the lexical constructionalization as productive expansion by investi-
gating the constructionalization of clauses and phrases, in other words, the develop-
ment of various kinds of expressions that have been called ‘idioms’. In early work on
construction grammar, the focus on idiosyncrasies necessarily meant that idioms
figured large among the constructions discussed. There has been extensive discussion
concerning how to distinguish among prefabricated units (‘prefabs’) (see e.g. Pawley
and Syder 1983, Erman and Warren 2000, Bybee and Cacoullos 2009), formulae (see
Wray 2002, 2006), idioms (see Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow 1994), and conventionalized
constructions (Kay and Michaelis 2012). We will not go into this debate here, but
mention that given the gradience of construction types in the constructicon, the
differences among the constructions seem best thought of as on a gradient. Nunberg,
Sag, and Wasow’s (1994) approach to idioms seems fruitful: distinctions can be made
along a continuum according to degrees of compositionality. On the semantic side, is
meaning transparent in any way, and on the form side is the expression variable in any
way? Spill the beans ‘divulge’ or saw logs ‘sleep’ are not semantically transparent, but on
the form side they allow some variation (for example, in tense, aspect, or modality).
A feature of the class of expressions under discussion is that they are usually
subtypes of ordinarily compositional free expressions and therefore have well-
formed syntax. By contrast even productive word-formation patterns such as are

illustrated by skyscraper may have fossilized patterns from earlier periods of the
language (in this case O V word order). A recently discussed idiom is X modal be
lucky to Y, which implies that the event in the complement clause (Y) ‘most likely will
turn out false’ especially in a negative polarity context (Karttunen 2013) as in:
(24) In fact you will be lucky to see any traffic at all. (Karttunen 2013: 174)
Although be lucky is the prototype in this construction, BE unlucky/(un)fortunate to
are also possible. In all cases to Y can be replaced by if Y as in (25):
(25) In fact you will be lucky if you see any traffic at all.
While the modal is typically will, occasionally would and should appear as well, cf.
You should be so lucky! (a fixed skeptical remark). Non-modal present and past tense
forms with an adverb are literal (e.g. be lucky enough) and non-idiomatic (e.g. You
were lucky (enough) to be born into a musical family).
The idiom X modal be so lucky to Y appears to go back to the beginning of the
nineteenth century:
(26) This measure appeared a death blow to the authority of Philip; when the news
was communicated at Versailles, marshal Villars could not refrain from exclaim-
ing, “Adieu, court of St. Ildefonso; you will be lucky to be assured of a regular
supply of your daily means!” (1813, William Coxe, Memories of the Kings of Spain
of the House of Bourbon, Vol. 2, 307 [Google Books; Karttunen 2013: 177]).
Karttunen notes that (26) is a translation from French, which does not have this
expression, only the conditional. The original is: Elle sera heureuse si son dîner et son
souper sont bien assurés ‘She will be happy if her lunch and dinner are well assured’.
A set of idioms that has been of considerable interest is what are called ‘snow-
clones’, for example, X BE the new Y, the formulaic pattern behind Green is the new
Black, the title of a book by Tamsin Blanchard on ethical consumerism, published in
2007. The term ‘snowclone’ was suggested by Glen Whitman in response to discus-
sion on Language Log, in which Geoffrey Pullum asked for a label for a type of cliché
that is ‘a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or
misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different
jokey variants by lazy journalists or writers’ (Pullum 2003).24 In a snowclone a fixed
specific expression becomes less fixed by virtue of introducing a variable (a formal
change), while the original meaning of the micro-construction generalizes. For
24
The term ‘snowclone’ originated in a joke recalling the debate about the number of terms for snow in
Eskimo that Pullum had written about. There is now an informal snowclones database (O’Connor 2007).
Pullum (2004, updated several times) accepted the term and cited several types of snowclone at http://itre.
cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.html.
example, My cup runneth over (Psalms 23:5) means ‘I have more than I need’ while
my X runneth over may simply mean ‘X is beyond capacity’, ‘X is too much’ etc.
There is always some indexical pragmatics (pointing in this case to a historical
English version of the Bible, not only conceptually, but morphologically with -eth).
Snowclones have limited variants: a search of COCA for variants of My X runneth
over returns 4 type hits. These are the original my cup runneth over with cup (10
instances), and 1 instance each with inbox, DVR and bowl. Other snowclones have a
wider range: a search in COCA for variants of X BE the new Y returns 11 type hits,
many of them colours but with some other forms like trust, saving and Jesus.
A Google search provides many more examples, such as Fake is the new real,
Programming is the new literacy, Post-black was the new black.25 In such cases, a
construct has been reused, taken as the basis of a pattern, ‘customized’ to the
particular discourse moment, and generalized in a way that makes it recognizable.
Zwicky (2006) argues that snowclones arise in several stages:
(a) A pre-formula stage in which variations on an expression occur, all under-
stood literally, and requiring no special knowledge (What one person likes,
another person detests),
(b) A catchy fixed formula is used (with similar meaning) often drawing on a
proverb, title, or quotation (One man’s meat is another man’s poison),
(c) The fixed expression may be quickly extended with the development of open
slots or playful allusion to it, e.g. via puns or other variations of it (One man’s
Mede is another man’s Persian),
(d) Snowcloning, a second fixing as variants become (relatively) routinized as
formulas with open slots in them (One man’s X is another man’s Y).
On this analysis, snowclones can be said to arise from lexical constructionalization of
a schema after a number of constructional changes.
Another formula that serves as a snowclone is not the sharpest tool in the box. In
this case the literal expression not the ADJest N1 in the N2 has become figurative, a
snowclone has been developed, and all the variants mean ‘stupid’. The particular
constraints on this snowclone are:
(a) The form is not the ADJest N1 in the N2,
(b) one of the (figurative) meanings of the adjective is ‘intelligent’; suitable
candidates are sharp, bright, quick,
(c) N1 is a noun the lexical semantics of which denote a concept with properties
typically associated with the non-figurative use of the adjective. For instance, if
25
This last snowclone appears in a 2001 exhibition catalog by Thelma Golden, curator of art created by
the post-civil rights generation of African-American artists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-black_art;
New York Times 30th 2012).
the adjective is bright (‘intelligent’, a figurative use), then N1 will be a noun that
denotes a concept which typically is bright in colour (not the brightest penny in
the purse),
(d) N2 is typically a container in which N1 is likely to be found, e.g. box, purse.
Expressions with the form not the ADJest N1 in the N2 have literal, compositional
interpretations (these are not snowclones). In their snowclone interpretation, while
not literally compositional, they nevertheless depend heavily on such factors as
retention of the negative, and recognition at some level that the adjective belongs
to the class characterized by a consistent quality/cognition ambiguity. We consider
this snowclone further in chapter 5.3.5.
It is clearly the case that certain micro-constructions do allow for enormous
growth even when the potential for variation seems slight. For instance, Go ahead
and X has well over 500 variants (COCA). The critical difference between not the
ADJest N1 in the N2 and Go ahead and X is that the latter is clearly doing procedural
work and is an instance of grammatical constructionalization, while not the ADJest
N1 in the N2 is doing contentful work and is an instance of lexical constructionaliza-
tion. As might be expected from a lexical, contentful construction, the snowclone also
depends crucially on evocation, which the grammatical one does not.
Questions have been raised whether some patterns of the sort we have discussed
here are actually constructions. Fillmore (1997) and Kay (2013) have variously
sought to distinguish creativity based on ‘patterns of coining’ from creativity
based on established constructions such as are illustrated by red ball (understood
as ‘ball that is red’, not the idiomatic red ball ‘urgent situation’). Kay says red ball
does not have to be learned as a micro-construction; it is the productive output of
default inheritance from the modifier–noun construction (the latter does presum-
ably have to be learned, however, in a usage-based constructionalist account).
Specifically, Kay proposes:
there are many patterns that appear in language data that do not qualify as parts of a
grammar . . . because, unlike the construction that licenses red ball, these patterns are neither
necessary nor sufficient to produce or interpret any set of expressions of the language: each
expression that exemplifies one of these patterns has to be learned and remembered on its own.
(Kay 2013: 32–33)
Kay compares the productivity of ALL- and WHAT-clefts, which are productive,
to formulas like dumb as an ox, flat as a pancake. Although there are several subtypes
(cf. comparatives like deader than a doornail), and there is a pattern which Kay
formulates as ‘A as NP [interpretation: ‘very A’]’, in Kay’s view this ‘formula does not
constitute a construction because it is not productive’ (p. 38). A problem with this
approach is that one cannot know without experimentation whether speakers do in
fact learn each string individually and whether they are likely or not to build new
expressions analogized to these patterns. Within a population of speakers individuals
will presumably have lesser and greater ability to develop new variants. Kay con-
cludes his paper with the question whether patterns of coining may give rise to
constructions, and suggests that the way-construction may have been a case in point,
and ‘grew out of a semantically heterogeneous lexical hodgepodge’ (p. 46). As shown
in chapter 2.7, the lexical beginnings of the way-constructions were not hodge-podge.
As is typical of pre-constructionalization, there were distinct patterns (in this case
clustering around motion and around acquisition) that over time became routinized
and appear to have been gathered into a schema, and subsequently subschemas were
developed. In the case of the contemporary [A as NP] pattern, its members may be
synchronically relatively more fixed than the way-construction, but in our view from
the perspective of emerging (and declining) patterns, the distinction is not one of
construction vs. non-construction, but of degree of productivity.
As Liberman (2006) says, snowclones are rather like Kay’s patterns of coining, but
are more productive; above all they are effective ‘in evoking a familiar concept’. We
appear to be dealing here with a continuum from low to high synchronic activation
potential. In a paper challenging Kay’s (2013) hypothesis, and showing that Spanish
equivalents of the [A as NP] pattern are not only more productive in Spanish than in
English, but also on a continuum with snowclones, Gonzálvez-Garcia (2011) con-
cludes that ‘language users store both the parts and the wholes, and retrieve them
when they need them (Bybee and Eddington 2006, Bybee 2010)’.
4.8 On the instantaneous development of some lexical constructions

The development of schemas and subschemas that we have discussed involve a
succession of changes—the accumulation of construction-types, and the gradual
crystallization of a (sub)schema. We have seen how in post-lexical constructionaliza-
tion there may be slow erosion of a subschema as members become obsolescent, and
also of individual micro-constructions as their internal structure becomes fused or
reduced. But not all lexical micro-constructions arise gradually. Here we mention a
few types of instantaneous change. While a word-formation schema may develop
gradually, the individual, specific micro-constructions modeled on the schema are
clearly not gradual developments. There is a formnew-meaningnew pairing (e.g.
dukedom), but not one which has arisen from a series of micro-steps. It is the result
of instant node-creation. Given the subschema [[V.er] $ [person who Vs]], we can
use almost any activity verb and instantaneously make an agentive noun out of it (e.g.
blogger), and it will function as a full-fledged noun. Given a name of someone in
authority, we can instantaneously create e.g. Obamadom to designate ‘the condition
of being in a world dominated by Obama’.26 Likewise, we can combine subparts of
26
See headline Obamadom!, Nov. 26th 2008 at http://sheafrotherdon.dreamwidth.org/303140.html
(accessed July 29th 2012).
words to create a micro-construction like sitcom, or an initialism like NGO.27 The

range of such forms is huge and a rich source of vocabulary and creativity. We cannot
do justice to them here, but mention them to highlight why we think of them as
different from the other instances of constructionalization that we have addressed in
this book, and in some cases to provide background for the next section in which we
revisit some examples that have been considered to be lexicalizations and counter-
examples to grammaticalization.
A highly productive and very regular word-formation pattern that has been used in
English from OE times is ‘conversion’, the recruitment of an extant micro-construction
for use in a different syntactic category, cf. use of the nouns calendar or window as
verbs, or, less frequently, of an adverb or preposition into a verb (to up), or any part of
speech into a noun (what ifs). Mattiello (2013: section 3.2.1.1) cites the case of to diss:
a conversion to a verb of the prefix clipped from disrespect. Conversion is a kind of
re-categorization, and the converted micro-construction is potentially used without
overrides of any general inheritance rules that apply to the part of speech to which it
has been recruited. As has frequently been pointed out, starting with Clark and Clark
(1979), conversion of a noun into a verb constrains the implied argument structure role
of the noun: to calendar is to enter a date on a calendar that preexists, not to make a
calendar or use a calendar as a decoration. To bicycle is to use a bicycle for locomotion,
and so on. Although there are distinctive patterns that sanction new formations, the
individual meanings are not completely compositional and must be learned, so the
output of conversion is a construction, but it has not arisen gradually.
The creation of new lexical constructions includes the innovation and then con-
ventionalization of neologisms, new lexical items created from the phonological
resources of the language. Sometimes the path of change can be quite indirect.
Consider quark, which first appeared in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939):28
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark
Murray Gell-Mann pre-empted it in 1964 to refer to a group of subatomic particles

and ever since it has been associated with particle physics.
With reference to the Joyce quotation, the OED suggests that the word refers to a
bird, or a noise made by a bird (s.v. quawk, n.).29 Let us assume that its original use by
27
This kind of instantaneous development is usually called ‘coining’ (though not in the sense of Kay
2013 discussed above).
28
See American Heritage Dictionary (2011) for this attribution, and for comments by Murray Gell-
Mann.
29
Immediately following this piece of verse in Finnegan’s Wake (p. 383), we find ‘Overhoved, shrill-
gleescreaming. That song sang seaswans. The winging ones. Seahawk, seagull, curlew and plover, kestrel
and capercallzie’.
Joyce was intended as the noise made by the bird (cf. three hurrahs for Muster
Mark!). This was an innovation in which Joyce made use of the phonological part of
his system in order to create a new sign in his individual language network. A new
node was created, but not through a series of micro-steps. Gell-Mann’s re-use of the
term, giving it a specific and concrete semantics is also instantaneous.
Mattiello (2013) provides an extensive synchronic study and classification of
various types of word-formation processes that are usually called ‘extra-grammatical
word-formation’ on the assumption that there are ‘rules’ that are not followed.
In constructional terms, they are neoanalyses based on a not easily definable
schema. Examples Mattiello cites represent a continuum from coinings that have
some properties of word-formation to others that do not. Closest to regular word-
formation are:
(27) phonaesthemes, e.g. forms in -ump denoting heaviness or clumsiness (clump,
dump); these are often playful,
back-formations (edit < editor and destruct < destruction); these depend on
analogical matching.
In the case of back-formations a pattern like swim – swimmer presumably motivated
edit – editor, but in the latter case the verb is derived from the noun, not vice versa.
Both processes are haphazard and minimally productive. Other examples involve
condensation of various kinds that result in the creation of a new name for an entity
or event:
(28) clippings (‘tude < attitude, (to) diss < disrespect),
compound clippings (sitcom < situation comedy),
blends (motel < motor hotel, chortle < chuckle and snort; recent blends are
tofurkey < tofu and turkey, Romnesia30 < Romney and amnesia),
Yet others involve condensation that typically does not result in a new meaning, but
rather indexes extant expressions. The phonological form of initialisms consists of
reading out each letter separately, which is not the case with acronyms:
(29) acronyms (AIDS /edz/, ‘acquired immune deficiency syndrome’),
initialisms (OTT /o ti ti/ ‘over the top’).
Changes of this type have been called extra-grammatical because they are minim-
ally productive and maximally idiosyncratic. Mattiello shows that they are in many
cases analogical (e.g. boatel, modeled on motel), constrained by well-formedness
constraints on the language such as syllable-structure constraints, and ‘surprisingly
30
A term coined by David Corn in June 2012 for a condition of changing political positions (http://
www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/mitt-romney-history-problem).
regular’ despite their unpredictability. Above all they are creative expressions that are
valuable for a variety of pragmatic discursive reasons from slang to professional
jargon.
While these word-formation patterns share some general principles associated
with formal changes to an existing construction, the situation on the meaning side is
rather different. Sometimes there is no change in semantics (sitcom and situation
comedy have the same lexical meaning), and the main meaning difference is a socially
pragmatic one associated with the degree of formality associated with the discourse
context. Sometimes there may appear to be a difference in meaning between the
source and the neologism, but it may turn out that in fact the semantic change was a
precursor to the formal change. Consider the case of ‘tude. This form means ‘hostile
behaviour or demeanour’, and it would appear to be pragmatically odd to say:
(30) a. !Why does she have such a bad ‘tude towards her dad?
b. !I’ve never met anyone with such a positive ‘tude.
The first would be redundant, the second contradictory (for many speakers). The first
attestation of ‘tude is in the 1970s. It appears that it is a clipping of attitude in the
pejorative meaning ‘aggressive or uncooperative behaviour; a resentful or antagon-
istic manner’ cited in a draft 1997 entry in the OED (attitude 6a) and attributed to
the early 1960s. Therefore, the clipping did not involve a change of meaning, its
source did.
One of the reasons that expressions of this type are considered idiosyncratic is that
there is a significant degree of unpredictability (and hence, variation) in exactly what
the new form-meaning pairing will be. Consider, for example, clipping of the word
pornography in English. For some speakers, the clipped form is a monosyllable
(porn), for others, a disyllable (porno). Similarly, the meal that is a combination of
breakfast and lunch is brunch, but it is not entirely predictable which specific parts of
the original words will be retained when blends are created (compare brunch with
Spanglish). However, there are some general guidelines to which speakers of English
typically adhere when creating these new forms: they do not combine the nucleus of
the rhyme of the first word with the coda of the rhyme of the second (see further
Gries 2004, Hilpert Forthcoming).
We ended section 4.6 with comments on two differences between lexical
and grammatical constructionalization. The present section has suggested a third
difference: the creation of lexical micro-constructions by word-formation and
‘extra-grammatical’ processes is typically instantaneous. We are not aware of the
instantaneous development of grammatical constructions. The following generalizations
can be drawn from the preceding sections: the creation of both lexical and grammatical
schemas is gradual; so is the creation of grammatical micro-constructions. Lexical
micro-constructions may, however, be created instantaneously. This is summarized in
Table 4.3.
TABLE 4.3. Gradual and instantaneous constructionalization

Lexical Cxzn Grammatical Cxzn
Schema gradual gradual

Micro-Cxn +/!gradual gradual
4.9 Lexical constructionalization and degrammaticalization

In the 1990s and the early 2000s several studies that challenged the hypothesis of
unidirectionality in grammaticalization suggested that some kinds of lexicalization
are a type of degrammaticalization (e.g. Ramat 1992, 2001, Newmeyer 1998, 2001,
Janda 2001, Van der Auwera 2002). Particularly often quoted in this literature are
examples like use of up, down as verbs, ante and if as nouns, and of derivational
morphemes like .ade, .ism as nouns (Ramat 2001). As has repeatedly been argued
since then (see e.g. Haspelmath 2004, Lehmann 2004), these are not examples of
degrammaticalization, since they are either conversions (up, down, ante, if ) or
clippings (ade, ism).31 Since they do not change gradually, they cannot be reversals
of grammaticalization, which is gradual. In the section above we have shown that
they are not instances of constructionalization in the sense in which we use the term.
In chapter 3.4, we considered the relation between degrammaticalization and
constructionalization. There, the focus was on the development of grammatical
constructions (like the English -s genitive, or Irish muid) and we suggested that
these can be seen as cases of grammatical constructionalization. Here we suggest that
certain kinds of changes that have been considered to be cases of degrammaticaliza-
tion are in fact legitimate instances of lexical constructionalization. Our example here
is what Willis (2007) terms ‘syntactic lexicalization’ because it arises as neoanalyses of
uses in syntax and Norde (2009) terms ‘degrammation’:
a composite change whereby a function word in a specific linguistic context is reanalysed as a
member of a major word class . . . gaining in semantic substance. (Norde 2009: 135)32
Willis argues that Welsh yn ol ‘after’ > nôl ‘to fetch’ originated in the sequence yn ol
being used in positions where a verbal sense ‘fetch’ could be inferred. This is a kind of
syntactic parallel to ‘deflexion’ (secondary degrammaticalization or shift from inflec-
tion to clitic in the sense of Norde 2009). Trousdale and Norde (2013) observe that
degrammation differs from cases like to up because it involves syntactic neoanalysis
and pragmatically ambiguous bridging contexts (on which see further chapter 5).
31
Norde (2009) provides a summary and assessment of the issues.
32
This is a different use of ‘degrammation’ than that of Andersen (2008: 22) who defines it as ‘[a]
change by which an expression, through reanalysis, loses grammatical content’.
In the case of Welsh yn ol ‘after’ > nôl ‘to fetch’, yn ol was largely used to mean
‘according to’. The spatial/prepositional sense was retained only in ‘a few frequent
(perhaps idiomatic) constructions such as ‘go after’ and ‘leave behind’’ (Willis 2007:
300, emphasis added). In the latter use, yn ol began to occur in positions where a
verbal sense ‘fetch’ could be inferred, as in (31):
(31) Dos yn ol y marchawc a aeth odyma
go.imper.2s yn ol the knight rel went.3s from-here
y’r weirglawd.
to.the meadow
‘Go after/fetch the knight who went away from here to the meadow’. (late
Middle Welsh, 15thC [Willis 2007: 294])33
This example is potentially ambiguous because yn ol can be interpreted as either the
preposition ‘after’ (‘Go after the knight who went from here to the meadow’), or an
infinitive marker and verb (‘Go to fetch the knight who went from here to the
meadow’). In the latter case, there has been phonological neoanalysis (n has been
associated with the following syllable34), and syntactic neoanalysis (nôl has been
reinterpreted as the head of a VP):
(32) [[yn ol]P y marchawc]PP ‘after the knight’ >
[y[[nol]V]VP y marchawc] ‘to fetch the knight’
The neoanalysis allowed nôl to be used as a full lexical verb and to take verbal suffixes
that mark, for example, imperative mood as in (33). Such examples are evidence for
constructionalization:
(33) Nolwch y Brenin i ’w examnio.
Fetch.imper.2p the King to 3sm examine.vn
‘Fetch the king to be cross-examined’. (late 17thC [Willis 2007: 297; Norde
2009: 150])
With constructionalization there was loss of a range of polysemies and a split
between the [[yn ol] $ [‘according to’]] that expands with a procedural function,
and the [[y nol] $ [go after]] that becomes more restricted with contentful seman-
tics. For the latter there is decrease in productivity, because it is used to collocate with
an increasingly restricted set of verbs, a case of host-class reduction in the sense of
Himmelmann (2004). However, nôl now inherits from the transitive construction.
There is also loss of compositionality following the resegmentation of the nasal to the
following word.
33
The notation in the gloss in (31) and (33) below is Willis’s.
34
Cf. in English such changes as a napron > an apron, and an eke-name ‘a same-name’ > a nickname.
4.10 Summary
In this chapter we have considered some of the ways in which new contentful
constructions come into being. Our focus has been on gradual constructionalization
of (sub)schemas, but we have also touched on instantaneous formation of new
micro-nodes, whether they are new word-formations, snowclones, clippings or
acronyms, once a (sub)schema has been developed.
We have proposed the following for gradual lexical constructionalization:
(a) Lexical constructionalization is of three types:
(i) the development of new complex micro-constructions; this may be grad-
ual, but typically is instantaneous recruitment into a schema,
(ii) the development of complex schemas and (sub)schemas through a series
of constructional changes (LE); this is gradual in the sense used through-
out the book,
(iii) the development of atomic micro-constructions out of complex micro-con-
structions through a series of constructional changes (LR); this too is gradual.
(b) Lexical constructionalization of new complex (sub)schemas is gradual and
involves a period of growth (expansion), i.e. increase in productivity. This is
analogous in many cases to host-class expansion, but in the case of word-
formation, the host-class is syntactically very local, being the stem. Semantically
host-classes are usually closely connected in the network (e.g. -ræden compounds
were associated with the judicial sphere, or with particular social relations).
(c) Some complex lexical schemas persist over time, with varying degrees of
productivity (compare productive .hood, with less productive .dom). But
growth may also be shortlived, and the schema may disappear (cf. -ræden),
sometimes through merger with another schema (e.g. ME -hede merged with
reflexes of OE -had).
(d) Reduction, whether obsolescence of a pattern, or micro-construction-internal
change (e.g. kindred), is gradual. Atomic lexical constructions may arise as the
remnants of former (partially) productive schemas (e.g. maidenhead, hatred,
garlic), or of compounds that did not participate in larger schemas (e.g. werewolf ).
With the exception of instantaneous changes in (a), these factors are largely
parallel to those found in grammatical constructionalization. However, loss is more
frequent in lexical than in grammatical constructionalization in part because many
lexical constructions are referential: nominal constructions in particular are more
subject to the influence of social factors such as contact and ideological changes than
most abstract grammatical ones.35
35
An exception in the grammatical domain is personal pronouns which may be highly subject to social
values and changes.
There are also significant differences between lexical and grammatical construc-
tionalization, most importantly instantaneous change in (a) and also (e):
(e) The output of lexical constructionalization is contentful, that of grammatical
constructionalization is procedural and indexical.
(f ) Lexical constructionalization typically does not involve syntactic expansion,
with respect either to becoming available in new syntactic contexts, or to being
used with new syntactic functions.
(g) In lexical constructionalization there is little bleaching although the contentful
semantics may become more general over time (e.g. bonfire).
(h) Post-constructionalization, the expansion of a word-formation schema may
often be short-lived. While not all cases of grammatical constructionalization
are long-lived (e.g. the recent development of the all-quotative and other
examples of short-lived changes discussed in Buchstaller, Rickford, Traugott,
and Wasow 2010), for the most part they tend to persist for several centuries.
We have shown that lexical constructionalization cannot be equated with lexicaliza-
tion defined as reduction because lexical constructionalization encompasses the
growth of schemas (e.g. word-formation and snowclone patterns) and expansion of
(sub)schemas as well as reduction. Therefore the claim in Trousdale (2008b, c, 2010,
2012a) that lexical constructionalization involves loss of productivity, loss of general-
ity, and loss of compositionality is too powerful for lexical constructionalization in
general. It does, however, hold for those instances of lexical constructionalization
that involve the development of atomic constructions from complex ones. The
relationship we have proposed can be summarized as in Table 4.4.
TABLE 4.4. Schematicity, productivity, and compositionality in

lexical and grammatical constructionalization
Lexical Cxzn Grammatical Cxzn
Schematicity schema growth: increase increase

schema loss: decrease
Productivity schema growth: increase increase
schema loss: decrease
Compositionality decrease decrease
Lexical constructionalization can also not be equated with lexicalization concep-

tualized as counterevidence for grammaticalization because:
(i) Some instances of alleged degrammaticalization qualify as instances of lexical
micro-constructionalization (cf. Welsh yn ol > y nôl).
(j) Some instances of alleged degrammaticalization are not instances of lexical

constructionalization (or indeed of lexicalization) (e.g. new lexical items
formed by clipping (ade and tude), or conversion (down ‘drink rapidly’).
With respect to the instantaneous creation of some lexical constructions, we have
shown that:
(k) Instantaneous creation of a type-construction is limited to micro-
constructions.
(l) The patterns on which instantaneous creations are based may be regular and
highly constrained (e.g. word-formation) or more general and unpredictable
(e.g. blends).
In the next chapter we turn to the issue of how the role of changes in linguistic
context may be best understood from a constructional perspective.
5
Contexts for Constructionalization
5.1 Introduction1
‘Context’ figures large in work on construction grammar. However, as Bergs and
Diewald (2009a) point out in their introduction to Contexts and Constructions, the
concept is ill-defined. They delimit it to ‘the overlapping area between pragmatics
and discourse’ (p. 3). This is consistent with Kay’s (2004) discussion of how one
interprets the construction let alone as in (1):
(1) Fred won’t order shrimp, let alone Louise, squid.
Kay says successful interpretation of (1) by the addressee occurs:
if he can find in, or construct from, the conversational common ground a set of assumptions
according to which Louise’s willingness to order squid unilaterally entails Fred’s willingness to
order shrimp. (Kay 2004: 676)
Here ‘context‘ can be understood as a complex structured set of relevant covert

pragmatic meanings, some associated with prior utterances, but especially those
evoked by the scalar construction let alone. Kay’s perspective is synchronic. But
even within a synchronic framework, attention to pragmatic and discourse context
only does not appear adequate for constructions understood as units combining both
form and meaning. On the one hand there are formal contexts which include specific
syntagmatic distributions, priming, etc., and on the other hand there are network
contexts—related nodes that enable analogical thinking. World knowledge and social
contexts such as speaker-hearer status, gender, locations of utterance may also
feature. From a diachronic perspective, the problem is to identify which construc-
tions are conventionalized as evoking or requiring which contexts, an issue that we
attempt to address in 5.3.
Context has also figured large in work on grammaticalization. In a much-cited
quotation, Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994: 297) said: ‘Everything that happens to
1
Parts of this chapter appear in Traugott (2012a, b), but in a grammaticalization, not a constructional
framework.
the meaning of a gram happens because of the contexts in which it is used’.

Himmelmann (2004) expanded on this:
Strictly speaking, it is never just the grammaticizing element that undergoes grammaticization.
Instead, it is the grammaticizing element in its syntagmatic context which is grammaticized.
That is, the unit to which grammaticization properly applies are constructions,2 not isolated
lexical items. (Himmelmann 2004: 31; italics original)
For example, lot is neoanalyzed as a quantifier only in indefinite binominal contexts

of the type a lot of (a) N. More recently Garrett has said:
We cannot understand how one thing has turned into another without locating the pivot
context in which the change originated and understanding how the properties of that context
invite the change. (Garrett 2012: 71)
We concur with these comments, noting that, while both authors write about
grammaticalization, what they say is true of language change in general, including
lexical change, although the role of syntagmatic contexts is clearly far greater in
grammatical than in lexical constructionalization. Furthermore, since constructions
are form-meaning pairings, the changes we investigate in contexts prior to and after
constructionalization must in our view involve both meaning and form—the initial
‘pivot’ may be discourse-functional, pragmatic or semantic, as well as formal.
So what is context? Catford (1965: 31) sought to distinguish ‘co-text—linguistic
context, relevant textual environment’ from ‘context of situation—participants, type
of interaction, e.g. face to face interaction, bystander status, culture’. Subsequently
researchers have found this distinction hard to maintain since it depends in part on
the linguistic approach being adopted. So the general term ‘context’ is usually used
instead, as it will be here. By ‘context’ we mean linguistic co-text broadly construed as
linguistic environment, including syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, prag-
matic inference, mode (written/spoken), and sometimes wider discourse and socio-
linguistic contexts. The inclusion of mode stems from the observation that there may
be significant differences with respect to linguistic structure depending on whether
the change is associated largely with spoken language or with written, and therefore
change may be affected by mode (Biber and Finegan 1997).
Context understood as co-text strictly defined has traditionally been restricted to
selectional restrictions on elements in the sentence. For example, König and
Vezzosi (2004) discuss the development of complex reflexive anaphors. In OE
these were unmarked, as in (2) but, as the PDE translation shows, they are now
marked by -self.
2
As noted in chapter 3.2.2, ft. 9, Himmelmann appears to use ‘construction’ in the sense of syntactic
string or constituent.
Contexts for Constructionalization 197
(2) hine he bewerað mid wæpnum.

3SG.ACC 3SG.NOM defend.3SG-PRES with weapons.DAT.PL
himi hei defends with weapons
‘He defends himself with weapons’. (König and Vezzosi 2004: 228)
König and Vezzosi define the onset contexts for the development of -self anaphors
as ‘sentences with other-directed transitive verbs and third-person singular sub-
jects’. Lehmann (2008: 211) likewise discusses contrastive clefting as developing
within a ‘complex sentence’ even though he regards the ‘operations of information
structure’ as ‘concerned with the manipulation of the universe of discourse’.
However, with increased interest in such factors as change in spoken language,
priming, and interfaces between information structure and syntax, the notion of
sentence as context is becoming less sustainable. The sentence is a unit of written
language and therefore not suitable for analysis of spoken discourse. Here the ‘clause’
or preferably the ‘intonation unit’ is the prime unit of analysis (Chafe 1994). As
mentioned in chapter 1.7, since our historical texts have until recently been written
only, the sentence has been assumed to be a viable unit of analysis. However, prior to
the seventeenth century the concept of sentence (which originally meant ‘opinion,
judgment’) was less codified than it is now. Punctuation that is sentence-based has in
many cases been added by modern editors. Therefore, the sentence is in fact a viable
unit only for a relatively recent period in the history of English. Construction
grammar avoids the problem since ‘sentence’ is not a construction. The larger
context in which change occurs is typically the ‘local’ constructional network, i.e.
that part of the network which is most strongly affected by spreading activation. In
cases of grammatical constructionalization, the local domain may be a particular
clause; in lexical constructionalization, the local domain may be a word-formation
schema, a phrase or a clause.
In this chapter we aim to show that an ideal account of contexts and constructio-
nalization requires attention to the three factors mentioned in earlier chapters:
(a) The linear flow of speech and writing (the axis of combination, syntagmatic
relations, and indexicality).
(b) The alternatives available (the axis of similarity, choice, paradigmaticity, and
iconicity).
(c) The more general and systemic changes affecting nodes and links in the
language network at the time.
Until recently, factor (a), change in linear distribution, has been the main focus of
much work on morphosyntactic change and grammaticalization. Factor (b) was
largely limited until the last few years either to work on inflectional morphology or
to work on the lexicon. Multivariate variationist studies of grammaticalization have
now begun to elucidate the contexts in which covariation on the axis of choice
(‘competition’) occurs (see summaries of issues in Poplack 2011, Torres Cacoullos

and Walker 2009). Diachronic collostructional analysis as developed by Hilpert
(2008) combines factors (a) and (b) and identifies changing paradigmatic choices
in linear collocations. Factor (c), the relationship of individual changes to larger
systemic changes in a language, has, as Fischer (2007) points out, not been addressed
adequately; nor have the connections among networks (see De Smet 2010). However,
progress has more recently been made combining especially factors (b) and (c) by
Norgård-Sørensen, Heltoft, and Schøsler (2011), using a more restrictive concept of
paradigmatic relations than that adopted here.
In this chapter we do not seek to exemplify ideal full-scale contextual analyses,
but to point to some of the factors that analyses of gradual changes enabling
constructionalization should incorporate. We therefore do not discuss contexts for
instantaneous developments of the type exemplified in chapter 4.8. We start by
outlining a framework for analyzing contexts that was originally designed to
account for grammaticalization but which we modify to account for constructiona-
lization in general (5.2). In 5.3 we briefly illustrate several kinds of change scenarios
that exemplify the framework developed in 5.2, in many but not all instances
reprising examples that have already been introduced in earlier chapters. We
distinguish between contexts that are construction-internal, those that involve
other constructions in the network, and those that are wide discourse functional
contexts, such as contesting argumentation. We thus distinguish between construction-
specific context (internal) and network context (the links between constructions),
and the discourse uses to which speakers put constructions. 5.4 touches on
the issue of persistence of enabling contexts after constructionalization, and 5.5
summarizes.
5.2 A framework for thinking about contexts

In previous chapters we have developed the proposal that pre-constructionalization
constructional changes enable (but do not predict) constructionalization, and that
post-constructionalization constructional changes may enable expansion (increased
productivity) as well as reduction of the new construction, whether schema or micro-
construction. This proposal draws directly on prior work on linguistic contexts for
grammaticalization and lexicalization (e.g. Heine 2002, Diewald 2002, 2006, Him-
melmann 2004). We consider some key factors relevant for pre-constructionalization
in 5.2.1 and for post-constructionalization in 5.2.2.
5.2.1 Key contextual factors in pre-constructionalization

As has been suggested in previous chapters, the key contextual factors in pre-
constructionalization are the following:
(a) The potential emergence of a new construction can be identified in onset

contexts that are tiny, minor morphosyntactic readjustments owing to
chunking, routinization and repeated selection of a particular set of constructs,
all showing evidence of gradualness.
(b) These ‘onset’ contexts include pragmatics, e.g. ‘invited inferences’ (Traugott
and König 1991), or ‘context induced interpretation’ (Heine, Claudi, and
Hünnemeyer 1991); they arise in the flow of speech or writing.
(c) Onset contexts are distinct from contexts in which the new expression can be
identified. The latter are called ‘switch’ contexts in Heine (2002) and ‘isolating’
contexts in Diewald (2002, 2006).
(d) The consequence of a series of tiny readjustments in onset contexts may give
rise to synchronic gradience in a system (Traugott and Trousdale 2010b).
One point of debate has been whether onset contexts must be ambiguous and if so
at what level of grammar. Ambiguity has been a cornerstone of much thinking about
neoanalysis as exemplified by the following statement about reanalysis: ‘reanalysis
depends upon a pattern characterized by surface ambiguity or the possibility of more
than one analysis’ (Harris and Campbell 1995: 51). On the other hand, Heine (2002)
and Diewald (2002, 2006) both eschew surface, structural ambiguity and instead
highlight covert pragmatic ambiguity. Heine refers to ‘bridging contexts’ which he
characterizes as pragmatic inferences, and Diewald to ‘untypical’ and later ‘critical’
contexts with ‘multiple structural and semantic ambiguities’ (Diewald 2002: 103).
While the textual record suggests that many instances of grammatical constructio-
nalization were preceded by ambiguity (see especially BE going to discussed below in
5.3.4), this is not always the case, therefore ambiguity cannot be considered a
requirement for neoanalysis in grammatical constructionalization. In the case of
the way-construction discussed in chapter 2.7, there is no obvious evidence of
pragmatic ambiguity nor is it clear what it could have been; here, enriched pragmat-
ics and atypical morphosyntactic distribution appear to have been key in the devel-
opment of the construction. Another example of lack of ambiguity is the
development in the fifteenth century of like into a (now non-standard) modal
auxiliary BE like to expressing ‘action narrowly averted’ (Kytö and Romaine 2005,
discussed in Traugott 2012a).
At this point it may be useful to clarify some terminology used largely in syn-
chronic analyses. Ambiguity is usually thought of as semantic. It refers to the
availability of two or more separate and structurally different parsings. If different
meanings do not cohere in a plausible manner, e.g. bill of a bird and bill to pay, they
are homonyms. If they cohere they are usually polysemous, especially when they have
the same source, e.g. book as product of writing, book as text to read, and book as
entity (Pustejovsky 1995). Vagueness refers to blended, simultaneously present sub-
cases of a more general meaning, e.g. aunt as mother’s sister and aunt as father’s
sister (Tuggy 1993, 2007). In the cognitive literature ‘vagueness, polysemy, and
homonymy represent a cline of diminishing schematicity and increasing instance
salience’ (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2007: 158). In other words they are on a con-
tinuum and it is not always easy to distinguish them in particular cases, especially
historically.
A fourth concept, pragmatic ambiguity (Horn 2001: chapter 6, Sweetser 1990), has
been of central importance in work on language change. As defined by Sweetser
(1990: 76) pragmatic ambiguity refers to ‘a single semantics . . . pragmatically applied
in different ways according to pragmatic context’. For example because is pragmatic-
ally, not semantically, ambiguous (Sweetser 1990: 77) in examples like (3).
(3) a. John came back because he loved her.
b. John loved her, because he came back.
c. What are you doing tonight, because there’s a good movie on.
Semantically, because expresses reason. In (3a) it pragmatically instantiates a real-
word relation, John’s reason for coming back, in (3b) the speaker’s reason for
thinking that ‘John loved her’, and in (3c) the speakers’ reason for asking ‘What
are you doing tonight?’ Likewise, cousin expresses a kin relationship, but in My
cousin married an actress, a difference between male and female cousins is activated.
This is clearly heavily contextually bound: in certain cultures, the prototypical
expectation is that the expression My cousin married an actress will activate, in the
hearer’s mind, a node ‘male cousin’, rather than ‘female cousin’. This nevertheless
can be overridden in societies where gay marriage is permitted, but this would
require either significant contextual knowledge (where context here encompasses
everything from knowledge of a particular culture to knowledge of the speaker and
his or her personal relations), or explicit clarification on the part of the speaker. The
kinds of pragmatic meanings that arise in context and are not inherent micro-senses
of an expression, but are used to unify the interpretation of an utterance with the rest
of the utterance in which it occurs are known as ‘contextual modulations’ (Hansen
2008: 23, drawing on Cruse 1986: 52). They are crucial factors in many changes, as we
will demonstrate below. However, as with vagueness, polysemy, and homonymy, it is
not always possible to make a sharp distinction between ‘inherent micro-senses’ and
modulation, especially when doing historical work. As Bybee (2010: 52) observes,
there is ‘no clear divide between aspects of the meaning that are derivable from
context and those that are inherent to the lexical item or construction’.
A new construction that has arisen by constructionalization often has meaning
similarities with the old construction. To date, the term ‘polysemy’ has been widely
used in the construction grammar and grammaticalization literatures to refer to
shared meanings. Since the term has been used in different ways clarification is
necessary. As discussed in chapter 2.4.1, Goldberg extends the term polysemy, which
is usually used for meaning similarities among uses of lexical items, to refer to
similarities of meaning among synchronic subschemas, and to identify links between

constructions in a network, specifically a category ‘with a family of closely related
senses’ (Goldberg 1995: 31). In the grammaticalization literature, however, the term
‘polysemy’ has largely been used at a level equivalent to the specific micro-
construction to refer to diachronic relationships between source and target.3 In
models of grammaticalization that focus on meaning change a new (target)
grammaticalized element is often said to be polysemous with the source until
the source is lost or splits and becomes a homonym. One hypothesis has been that
when pragmatic polysemy is neoanalyzed it is neoanalyzed as semantic polysemy
at the switch stage of grammaticalization. For example, in an early version of the
model of contexts for grammaticalization, Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer (1991:
73) say that after grammaticalization the form ‘F now has two “polysemies,” A and
B, which may develop eventually into “homophones” ’. The polysemy of older and
newer layers of grammaticalized elements has been taken for granted in Hopper
and Traugott (2003: 102) where grammatical items are said to be ‘characteristically
polysemous’. More recently Bybee commented that:
Since new meanings arise in specific contexts, they do not immediately replace old meanings;
rather there can be long periods of overlap or polysemy where old and new meanings coexist.
(Bybee 2010: 199)
The neoanalysis of pragmatic meaning as coded, semantic meaning is in our view

an important step in many cases of constructionalization. As discussed in chapter
1.4.2.3, this results in mismatch, and therefore a term for the shared meanings
between an earlier micro-construction1 and a later micro-construction2 is needed.
As mentioned in chapter 2.4.1, we propose to use the term ’heterosemy’ for meanings
shared between earlier and later constructions, i.e. as a diachronic association
between two meanings. Attributing the term to Persson (1988), Lichtenberk (1991a)
argues that it is more accurate than polysemy
where two or more meanings or functions that are historically related, in the sense of deriving
from the same ultimate source, are borne by reflexes of the common source element that
belongs in different morphosyntactic categories. (Lichtenberk 1991a: 476)
Using the terms ‘heterosemy’ and ‘polysemy’ allows us to distinguish meaning-

links between constructions that are historically related by constructionalization
(heterosemy), from synchronic meaning-links between subtypes of a schematic
construction (polysemy). For example, there is heterosemy between partitive and
quantifier a lot of, but polysemy between sub-types of the quantifier construction (e.g.
the set of large-size binominal quantifiers like a lot/load/heap of and the set of small-
3
It is, however, sometimes used with reference to replicated polysemies across categories, e.g. Givón
(1991: 292) writes of the ‘systematic polysemy’ of groups of complement-taking verbs in Hebrew.
sized ones like a bit/shred/smidgen of ). Likewise, there is heterosemy between a

compound like cyning|dom ‘king jurisdiction’ and the affixal word-formation
king.dom ‘royal territory’, but polysemy between the several word-formation sub-
schemas of nouns in Middle English that denoted a status or condition (see chapter
4.5.3). We therefore modify Bybee’s statement quoted above as follows:
Since new meanings arise in specific contexts, they do not immediately replace old meanings;
rather there can be long periods of overlap or heterosemy where old and new meanings coexist.
An issue of some debate has been whether changing onset contexts should be
considered to be either background or foreground factors in a particular change.
Much of the problem here stems from what is meant by ‘background’ and ‘fore-
ground’, whether they are identified with the original ‘source’ use or with the new
‘target’ use (these terms are used with hindsight about a stage prior to grammatica-
lization (source) and at or after grammaticalization (target)). Behind the hypothesis
of invited inferencing, specifically that much semantic and grammatical change is
pragmatic at onset, is the proposal that what are initially background implicatures
come to be enriched and foregrounded prior to change (Traugott and Dasher 2002:
34–40). Likewise Heine (2002: 86) says the result of the emergence of bridging
contexts that enable grammaticalization is that ‘[t]arget meaning is foregrounded’.
Terkourafi (2009) makes a somewhat similar hypothesis about foregrounding of
contextual factors, but includes non-linguistic contexts in the mix. Drawing on
Goodwin and Duranti (1992) she suggests that ongoing talk involves an utterance
(‘figure’), a minimal context (‘ground’, including speakers and the setting), and a
background (encyclopedic knowledge), and that ground is ‘simultaneously con-
strained and invested with meaning by the latter’ (Terkourafi 2009: 34). She suggests
that ‘[t]hrough acculturation, these contextual parameters gain in salience’ (p. 35). In
other words, repetition of certain uses in certain contexts will foreground the context.
A problem is that ‘salience’ is not well understood and there are questions about how
to interpret it in a model of unconscious change, such as Keller’s (1994) ‘invisible
hand’ model (see Hansen 2008 and, for salience in cognitive linguistics, Schmid
2007). These interpretations of change in grammaticalization all suggest enrichment
of prior contextual pragmatics in the direction of the newly emerging ‘target’ (see
discussion in 3.2.2 of bleaching in terms of a loss-and-gain model). By contrast,
Hansen and Waltereit (2006) and Hansen (2008) argue against Heine’s and Traugott
and Dasher’s hypotheses, and claim that what Heine calls the bridging interpretation
(enriched pragmatics) is ‘still background with respect to the source meaning, and
only moves into the foreground’ when the stage of switch/isolating contexts is
reached (Hansen 2008: 63). Boye and Harder’s (2012) hypothesis that grammaticali-
zation involves the attribution of secondary, ancillary, background meaning to
expressions (see chapter 3.2.1) would also appear to be inconsistent with the hypoth-
esis that pragmatic contexts become enriched and increasingly accessible to a group
of speakers. Despite these objections, on our view the pragmatic context must by
hypothesis be foregrounded to be sufficiently activated to enable change. Corpus data
for several developments supports this view, as we show in discussion of contexts for
the development of the quantifier a lot of (5.3.2), quantifier several (5.3.2), and BE
going to future (5.3.4).
5.2.2 Post-constructionalization contextual changes

Constraints on contexts after grammaticalization are largely associated with ‘actual-
ization’, or the spread across the system of new elements (see e.g. Timberlake 1977,
Andersen 2001, De Smet 2012). Here we mention three lines of thought and show
how they may be adapted to a constructionalization framework. One is associated
with gradual expansion and analogization, the second with persistence, and the third
with ‘coercion’.
While Himmelmann (2004) discusses host-class, semantic-pragmatic, and syntac-
tic expansion as contextual expansion, little is said about the question of constraints
on that expansion. Of recent interest has been evidence for almost imperceptible
steps in expansion, an idea consistent with micro-change. Focusing on evidence for
analogy and the importance of similarity relations, De Smet (2012: 629) suggests that
the constraints guiding actualization are ‘at least in part a function of the resemblance
a given innovation bears to existing patterns already licensed by the grammar’ and
that ‘new steps in the actualization process are easier to take if the result resembles
some established coocurrence path’ (p. 625). An example he gives is of the downtoner
all but (< ‘everything except’). The downtoner use originally appears with predicate
nominals as in (4a) and then with predicate adjectives (4b):
(4) a. Pshaw, pshaw! This is all but the whining end of a modern novel. (1773
Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer [CL 1; De Smet 2012: 611])
b. as if the works of nature were not all but infinite, (1821 North American
Review [COHA])
The next step is expansion to passives (5a), and, with increasing frequency, verbs (5b):
(5) a. The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks. (1851
Melville, Moby Dick [COHA])
b. He all but fell down and knocked his head on the table out of sheer helpless
astonishment. (1948 Allen, Toward Morning [COHA; De Smet 2012: 612])
De Smet argues that the path to collocation with verbs is one of similarity and that
passive past participles represent what we would call a transition point, having
similarity relations between verbs and adjectives (p. 612). He finds confirmation in
the fact that the verb collocates that are favored in the data are past tense forms that
are identical to past participles, e.g. finished, thought (p. 612). So all but ‘can be seen to
spread from one environment to another along a network of similarity relations that
hold between those environments’ (p. 616). An additional, though distant, semantic
link in the network in this case is presumably the use of all meaning ‘only’ as in ALL-
pseudo-clefts.
De Smet also discusses ways in which earlier distributions may affect later devel-
opments, showing that the rise of adjectival uses of fun and key suggest ties to earlier
uses as a modifying mass noun. According to De Smet, while fun is used adjectivally
in both predicate and attributive contexts, key is preferred in pre-adjectival attribu-
tive contexts (6a) from its incipience around 1950 to 1980, when predicate uses begin
to dominate (6b, c).
(6) a. Therefore, we shall start our description of the behaviour of electric charges
in motion by summarizing the key experimental observations. (1961 Sherwin,
Basic Concepts of Physics [COHA; De Smet 2012: 623])
b. We are totally independent, and that's a very key point. (2002 CBS, Sixty
Minutes [COCA; De Smet 2012: 624])
c. Oh, absolutely. Cars are very key. (2003 CBS, Sixty Minutes [COCA; De Smet
2012: 624])
De Smet attributes this step-wise development as in part reflecting the original use of
key as a count noun that can occur attributively as in a key factor, while fun
originated as a mass noun, and could therefore occur predicatively as well as
attributively (the fun game, that’s fun).
The paths of the development of all but and key discussed here pertain to
‘persistence’ or maintenance of ties to earlier distributions, a ‘look-back’ effect
which is discussed in greater detail in 5.4 below. De Smet (2012) also seeks to predict
on the basis of analogy what an item probabilistically ‘may pick up’ (p. 609). Unlike
persistence, this is a ‘reach-forward’ effect. The fact that new members of existing
categories tend to be used in ways similar to the category they now belong to is
theorized in construction grammar as ‘coercion’. Mentioned in Goldberg (1995) and
elaborated on in Michaelis (2004: 25) coercion is an inferential procedure or type-
shifting whereby ‘the meaning of the lexical item conforms to the meaning of the
structure in which it is embedded’. Coercion presupposes that lexical nouns and
verbs may have certain inherent semantics, even though they are underspecified, and
that these are subject to the effects of grammatical constructions. For example,
according to Michaelis the prototypical partitive construction involves type-shifting:
the partitive
is designed to shift the unbounded value of the (necessarily undetermined) lexical complement
(say pie, as in a piece of pie) to the bounded value associated with the head (piece) [and]
requires that the nominal complement of the PP headed by of denote a mass entity. (Michaelis
2003: 173, bold added)
‘Requires’ in this quotation deserves comment. Michaelis here draws on Goldberg’s

idea that ‘a construction requires a particular interpretation that is not independently
coded by particular lexical items’ (Goldberg 1995: 159). A well-known example is the
way in which count nouns are understood as mass nouns when used without an
article (e.g. There’s lizard on the road, meaning there is some kind of lizard-mass on
the road, probably because a lizard was run over). Another is the way in which events
expressed by telic accomplishment verbs are understood as not having been com-
pleted when used with the progressive, e.g. Joan was winning when she fell does not
entail that she won; by contrast, Joan was running when she fell does entail that she
ran since run is an atelic activity verb. Yet another example that has been cited is the
way-construction, in which elbowed in She elbowed her way through the room is often
said to acquire the implicature of obstruction and difficulty and the semantics
‘pushed through using X’ from the constructional pattern meaning.
From a usage point of view, coercion has to be regarded as the contextual effect of
schemas and exemplar templates—using a lexical construction in the context of a
schematic grammatical construction may trigger a mismatch, because the hearer
potentially aligns—creates a link—between one node in a network and another, and
that representation is not shared with the speaker’s mental representation. Default
compositionality is overridden and hearers resolve the semantic conflict on-line.
Coercion has largely been referred to with respect to synchronically well-entrenched
patterns, such as the count/mass and telic/non-telic mismatches mentioned above.
While such effects do appear to have synchronic validity, they are best understood as
conventional, normative, and probabilistic, not absolute requirements. Otherwise
change could not occur, nor would it occur step-wise in ways outlined above.
Furthermore, one might expect micro-constructions that are recruited to extant
schemas to match the prototype schemas with fewer idiosyncrasies and unique
constraints than they do if coercion were a direct and strong force ‘requiring’ some
particular interpretation. As we suggested in chapters 2.5 and 3.5.1 and as we show in
section 5.3.4, new members of extant constructions are typically marginal members of
the category initially, and become fully absorbed into them only over time.
Ziegeler (2007, 2010) has questioned whether coercion is needed as an independent
mechanism. Traugott (2007) has questioned whether it is ever ‘required’, given that
changes occur. However, there is no question that certain collocations are preferred
at particular times in the history of a construction, but these may change, as is amply
attested by Hilpert’s (2008) work on changing collostructions. Nor is there any
question that if a new verb is used in e.g. the way-construction it will probably be
readily fitted into the meaning of the construction, provided it has some plausible
semantic compatibility with the construction. If a nonsense verb is used in a
ditransitive it will probably be understood as belonging to the default category
(give-type), e.g. to grung someone something will probably be understood as express-
ing transfer rather than intended transfer (the bake-type). Goldberg (2006: 116)
discusses experiments in which 60% native English speakers understood she mooped
him something as meaning she ‘gave’ him something. However, this interpretation
presumably depends in part on the immediate linguistic context as well as the
schema—grung Sheilah a degree might be understood differently from grung Sheilah
a cake, moop Alex a story differently from moop Alex a ball. In our view, mismatches
result inevitably from the interaction of on-line production and the choices that need
to be made in filling slots within a complex schema, and the relations between slots in
a schema. Hearers encountering mismatches attempt to find a suitable interpretation.
Some mismatches are more common, therefore more likely to be entrenched than
others. These are the ones that have been said to coerce meaning. But the ability to
understand She was winning when she fell or There’s lizard on the road is in principle
no different from that shown by hearers encountering innovative uses. As Diewald
(2006: 10) says in connection with grammaticalization:
coercion, understood as the use and reinterpretation of lexemes in previously incompatible
constructions, is based on cognitive and pragmatic procedures like metaphorical extension
(which, too, may be treated as a kind of analogical transfer) and conversational implicatures in
Grice’s sense.
She goes on to point out that such pragmatically motivated interpretation by

interlocutors is consistent with Michaelis’s (2004: 7) characterization of coercion
effects as ‘triggered when the interpreter must reconcile the meaning of a morpho-
syntactic construction with the meaning of a lexical filler’. It is the basis of creativity.
Older contexts for the source and newer ones for the emerging target are always
shifting. In the process mismatches constantly occur and language users are well-
equipped to interpret them. We conclude that coercion is neither deterministic nor a
unique property of constructions. The term and the way it is discussed suggest ‘top-
down’ effects of rigid extant schemas. Our view is ‘bottom-up’, and essentially
consistent with De Smet’s of probabilistic matching based on perceived similarity.
While coercion is meant to account for the phenomenon of mismatch and viola-
tion of norms (usually with complex schemas), ‘blocking’—preemption of new forms
and patterns by extant ones—accounts for resistance to overrides. The best-known
examples of preemption are lexical, e.g. preemption of *stealer by thief, and mor-
phological, e.g. preemption of *mans by men (Langacker 2008: 235). Sometimes
homonymy blocking may also occur (a small pig is a piglet, a small book is a booklet,
but a small toy is not a toylet, the latter being preempted by toilet, while listed waiter
‘person who attends to diners’ blocks the more transparently compositional and
more general waiter ‘person who waits’ (Giegerich 2001)).4 ‘Resistance to overrides’
implies that blocking is not deterministic. Rather, it is a function of frequency (Bybee
2006) and of social convention. For example, catched is preempted by caught in
4
See Plag (1999) for some discussion of problems associated with the concept of homonymy blocking.
Standard English but not in many other varieties. Langacker suggests that specific
units ‘have an advantage’ over more abstract ones. In other words, speakers access
extant forms easily. This is true, but because abstract (sub)schemas are accessible,
and analogical thinking is easily activated, new forms can be introduced. It is not the
extant forms or the (sub)schemas that have advantages or offer resistance to new
forms, it is speakers’ conventions that do so.
5.3 Types of contexts for constructionalization

In this section we spotlight several cases of constructionalization with focus on onset
contexts prior to constructionalization, but also some discussion of contexts post-
constructionalization. We have chosen change scenarios according to the hypothe-
sized degree to which the immediate locality of the internal structure of a construc-
tion does or does not serve as the enabling factor for constructionalization. The
scenarios are organized roughly on a scale of immediately local contexts to wider
discourse contexts. Construction-internal contexts are those in which one or more
constituents of a complex construction serve as enabling factors. Usually there is
pragmatic modulation and some distributional preferences or constraints can be
detected. This is the constructional version of traditional selectional restrictions. We
will show that sources may be constructions of a different degree of complexity or
level of schematicity than their targets. Most examples have been discussed in earlier
chapters, but two, the development of -lac as an affixoid (discussed in 5.3.1), and the
development of several as a quantifier (discussed in 5.3.3), have not.
5.3.1 Contexts for the development of word-formation schemas:

-dom, -ræden, and -lac.
In this section, we in part revisit the development of nominal compounds into
nominals with derivational affixoids, including those in -dom, and -ræden, discussed
in chapter 4.5 and 4.6, and also introduce the marginally productive ME schema with
-lac, an affixoid used to derive abstract nouns. Only one word-formation with -lac
survives into ModE: wedlock (originally it referred to the marriage vow rather than
the state of marriage). In 4.5 we pointed out several factors relevant for constructio-
nalization. One is that the most general meaning of the noun, e.g. dom, and ræden,
underwent change. From a contextual point of view, we may say that only those
compounds of which the second constituent was dom underwent change when the
first allowed a general interpretation of dom rather than the more specific meanings
like ‘doom’, ‘dignity’, ‘power’, ‘choice’. As will be explained below, the first (‘base’)
nouns had certain specific semantic properties. Similarly, only those compounds in
which ræden was the second constituent underwent change when the semantics of
the first allowed interpretation of ræden as ‘condition’ rather than its more specific
meanings ‘estimation’, ‘rule’. In OE, lac as a noun meant ‘game, fight’ but as the
second constituent of a compound it meant ‘action, proceeding’ (Haselow 2011: 157).

Again we can say that only those compounds of which the second constituent was lac
underwent change when the first allowed a general interpretation of lac as ‘action or
proceeding’ rather than the more specific meanings like ‘game’, ‘fight’.
Dalton-Puffer (1996), Dietz (2007), Trips (2009), and Haselow (2011) all discuss
two aspects of the word-formations in question. One is the syntactic class of the
base (noun, adjective, verb), the other is the constraints on the semantics of the base.
Focusing on the latter, the following points may be noted. dom appears to have been
construed as the second element of a compound, later affixoid, if the base denotes a
state characterized by the behaviour of a group of individuals (cristen|dom ‘chris-
tianity’, martyr|dom), the rank of a group of individuals (biscop|dom ‘rank of
bishop’), the abstract result of an action (swic|dom ‘deceit’), or a state defined by a
particular quality (freo|dom ‘freedom’) (based on Haselow 2011: 153). Over time the
semantic constraints were shifted or relaxed as |dom was neoanalyzed as an affixoid
and later affix; for example biscop|dom came to mean the location over which a
bishop had authority, rather than the status of being a bishop. Trips identifies having
authority as the chief semantic feature of PDE .dom. Relaxing of the semantic
constraint on the base led to expansion of the bases in ME. In the case of ræden, it
appears to have been most likely to be interpreted as a compounding element, later
affixoid, when the first constituent was a noun denoting judicial relations (mann|ræden
‘service, dues paid by tenant to owner of house’), and social relations (feond|ræden
‘enmity’). As discussed in chapter 4.5.2, ræden was a marginal member of the set of
nominals that came to be derivational affixes. So was lac. It was bleached in the context
of bases referring to ‘actions with a high degree of dynamics and the involvement of
physical energy’, e.g. heaðo|lac ‘warfare’, wif|lac ‘carnal intercourse’, reaf|lac ‘robbery’,
bryd|lac ‘celebration of marriage’ (Haselow 2011: 137). These semantic contexts are in
part a function of the syntax of the base. In the case of dom, ‘quality’ was associated
with adjectival bases ( freodom, wisdom). lac came in ME to be associated mainly with
adjectival bases (perhaps under the influence of the Old Norse cognate -leikr), enabling
a short-lived period of expansion to bases denoting states and conditions ( freo ‘free’ –
freolac ‘voluntary offering’; god ‘good’ – godlac ‘goodness’) (Dalton-Puffer 1996: 81).
In the three cases of word-formation discussed here, the semantic constraints on
the base were relaxed over time as the word-formation became more productive. This
is a type of host-class expansion at the lexical pole. The meaning of the second
constituent of the compound was the most general one available for the nominal
from which it was derived, and over time there was further generalization of the
meaning of the derivational construction, as well as of the base. This is a case of slight
semantic-pragmatic reduction (bleaching). With respect to syntactic contexts, these
were essentially the base, primarily adjectival and nominal, but in some cases also
verbal. There is clearly evidence of expansion of the syntactic type of the bases used
with the affixoids -dom and -lac. However, as is to be expected of nouns, there is no
evidence of expansion to wider syntactic contexts, e.g. the argument role in which the
base was used, or use as a pragmatic marker. In conclusion, expansion was very local,
within the word-formation schema.
5.3.2 Partitive contexts for the development of binominal quantifiers: a lot of

In the previous subsection the context for constructionalization was the compound, a
complex schema with a morphological dependency, together with the semantics of
the base. In this subsection we revisit the development of binominal part and size
noun expressions such as a lot of into quantifiers. This too is a complex schema, but
one with a syntactic dependency; here the semantics of the modifier NP is crucial.
In the grammaticalization literature OE representations of the partitives with geni-
tive inflection would not normally be included in discussion of the grammaticalization
of the quantifiers since the form is not preserved. However, from a constructionaliza-
tion perspective, which pays attention to families of constructions, these are relevant
precursors at the level of the general schema within which the quantifying pragmatics
of the indefinite subschema (‘pseudo-partitive’) became salient.
An OE example with a modifier in genitive case is (7):
(7) On Fearnes felda ge byrað twega manna hlot landes
in Fearn’s field you extend two men’s parcel land.GEN
in to Sudwellan.
in to Southwell
‘In Fearn’s field extend a parcel/share of land large enough for two men . . . ’ (958
Grant in Birch Cartul. Sax. III. 230 [OED lot n. 2.a.])
In OE there was no indefinite article, but it is reasonable to assume that this was
understood as non-anaphoric and indefinite. Ormulum, written about 1200, is one of
the earliest texts in which lot is found with an indefinite article and of, as in (8). Here
because NP2 is ‘people’, lot can be understood as akin to ‘group’:
(8) tat tegg wisslike warenn an lott off tatt Judisshenn follc.
that they certainly were a part of that Jewish people
‘that they [Pharisees] certainly were a part of that Jewish people’. (c.1200
Ormulum 16828 [PPCME, Brems 2011: 211])
In the same text lot is also used with a meaning close to ‘kind’:
(9) Ne nan off þise cullfress Þatt sindenn i þiss midderrærd
not none of these doves that are in this world
an lott off manne fode.
a part of man’s food
‘Nor any of these that are on earth part/kind of man’s food’ (c.1200 Ormulum,
10939 [MED man 1a.c])
A later example, where lot unambiguously means ‘unit for sale’ is found in (10), but
this construct is not strictly speaking an example of the ‘pseudopartitive’ construction
under discussion (see chapter 1 ft. 17) since it is definite and has an attributive adjective:
(10) You must tell Edward that my father gives 25s. a piece to Seward for his last lot
of sheep, and, in return for this news, my father wishes to receive some of
Edward's pigs. (1798 Austen, Letter to her Sister [CL 2])
These examples all show ‘contextual modulation’—pragmatic enrichment given
different collocates, all within the partitive construction.
A part implies a quantity, and a group implies a fairly large quantity, as in (11):
(11) a. said he, I understand you sell Lambs at London; I wish I had known it,
I would have brought a Lot of Lambs for you to have sold for me. He told me
he liv'd at Aston-Cliston; I said that was a pretty Way; but he said . . . the
Butcher could take but few at a Time, and he wanted to sell them all
together. (1746 Trial of John Crips, t17460702-25 [OBP])
b. and there shall be a warm seat by the hall fire, and honour, and lots of
bottled beer to-night for him who does his duty in the next half-hour. (1857
Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days [CL 3])
In these examples a lot of and lots of could be understood as either ‘individual units’
or ‘many, much’. With the plural (lots of ), the implicatures of quantity become
particularly salient, Particularly interesting is (11a) where there is discussion about
selling the lambs individually (a few at a time) or as a unit (all together). (11b),
however, is probably about ‘much beer sold in bottles’, though it could conceivably be
about ‘packs of bottled beer’. In these examples, the implicature of quantity would
appear to be foregrounded not backgrounded.
In (12a) a quantity reading is most plausible since wasps (unlike bees) tend not to
fly in units or groups (a paraphrase by a piece/share/unit/group of wasps is semantic-
ally incongruous). Likewise in (12b) a quantity reading is identifiable because abstract
room does not come in units:
(12) a. The next day the people, like a lot of wasps, were up in sundry places. (c.1575
J. Hooker, Life Sir P. Carew (1857) 49 [OED lot n. 8.a.])
b. Clear away, my lads, and let's have lots of room here!
(1843 Dickens, Christmas Carol [CL 2])
Recent grammars consider the quantifier use ‘informal’ (e.g. Quirk, Greenbaum,
Leech, and Svartvik 1985: 264). Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999:
277) comment that quantifiers ending in of are ‘recent’ and ‘[i]t is thus no surprise
that these are relatively rare, and when they do occur, they are most typically found in
conversation, or carry a strong overtones of casual speech’. As (12a) shows, a lot of is
not all that recent in its origins, assuming the 1857 edition is faithful to the original
1575 edition. A lot of is, however, rarely used as a quantifier until the nineteenth
century. The data do suggest that it arose primarily in texts on the conversational
pole of the oral-literate continuum such as the Old Bailey Proceedings. In literate
genres such as philosophy and many novels represented in CLMETEV a lot of is,
however, largely used for ‘fate’ rather than amount, as in (13), which may be part of
the reason why it was proscribed at first.
(13) the consciousness of that remaining tie . . . could alone have sustained the
victim under a lot of such unparalleled bitterness. (1837 Disraeli, Venetia [CL 2])
As pointed out in chapter 1.5.3 a quantity reading is obtained when anaphoric
reference is not to a lot (the anaphor is it) but to a plural NP2 (them, they in
(14a)). In (14b) be in the existential construction is plural agreeing with beasts, not
singular agreeing with a lot. These are the kinds of (morpho)syntactic context
expansions Himmelmann (2004) identifies for grammaticalization:
(14) a. Q. You bought a lot of sheep at Salisbury. – A. Yes. We brought them from
there to Willsdon to graze; they were purchased on the 12th of August. (1807
Trial of John King, t18071028-3 [OBP])
b. and soon got among a whole crowd of half-grown elephants, at which
I would not fire; there were a lot of fine beasts pushing along in the front,
and toward these I ran as hard as I could go. (1855 Baker, Eight Years
Wandering in Ceylon [CL 3])
The changes provide evidence that constructionalization has taken place and the
semantics-syntax mismatch has been resolved. Further evidence for constructiona-
lization is collocation with abstract nouns such as fun, hope, truth, none of which
are conceptualized in parts. This is Himmelmann’s semantic-pragmatic context
expansion.
As discussed in chapter 1.5.2, the quantifier use shows not only semantic attrition
(of concrete ‘piece, share’) to more abstract quantification prior to constructionaliza-
tion, but post-constructionalization also morpheme boundary and phonological
reduction (represented in non-standard writing as alotta and a lotta, and on-line
in the form allot of ). This kind of post-constructionalization attrition appears to be
motivated by frequent use in informal, relatively rapid speech, an external context.
The examples presented here suggest that the immediate linguistic context for the
constructionalization of quantifier a lot of is the partitive schema, especially the
semantics of N2. But the development should not be thought of independently of
the wider set of partitive > quantifier changes, or of the set of binominal measure >
quantifier changes discussed in Brems (2010, 2011), e.g. loads of, and the set of
binominal type > approximator constructions (Denison 2002, 2011; also Brems
2011), e.g. a sort/kind of. The latter originally meant ‘type’ as in a sort of moss and
came to be used as an approximator as in a sort of (a) wife). Each of the binominal

constructions had their own histories, but all share similar structures and scaling
semantics leading to constructionalization, followed by further expansion of
collocates.
As mentioned in chapter 2.3.2, an early precursor and no doubt partial attractor
was dæl ‘part’ in a partitive construction. In (15a) the grammarian Ælfric translated
the Latin hoc occiput ‘this occipital lobe’ with an expanded relational phrase (‘back of
the head’). In (15b) of is presumably intended in its original spatial meaning (‘out of,
from’), but it appears to be bleached here (of PLACE expressions are a highly frequent
type of collocation):
(15) a. hoc occiput se æftra dæl ðæs heafdes
this occipital lobe that posterior part that.GEN head.GEN
‘this occipital lobe: the back part of the head’
(c.1000 Ælfric’s Grammar 74.6 [DOE])
b. Ic gife þa twa dæl of Witlesmere.
I bequeath the two parts of Witlesmere
(a1121 Peterb.Chron. (LdMisc 636) [MED del n2, 1a])
(16) exemplifies pragmatic ambiguity between dæl as unit and as ‘amount/quantity’
since both instances are modified by a quantifying adjective (micel ‘much’ and god
‘goodly/sizeable’) and NP2 refers to a mass (wæter ‘water’ and huniʒ ‘honey’).
(16) Micel dæl bewylledes wæteres on huniʒes godum
great part boiled.GEN water.GEN in honey.GEN good.DAT
dæle.
measure.DAT
‘(Measure) a great amount of boiling water into a goodly measure of honey’.
(c.1000 Sax. Leechd. II. 202 [OED deal n1, 3])
Syntactically, however, this is clearly partitive since the first NP2 is modified by an
adjective (bewylled ‘boiled’) and honey is preposed.
The implicature of quantity became routinized with indefinite uses of dæl espe-
cially in the ‘critical contexts’ of quantifying adjectives such as micel ‘much’ and great
and mass nouns, giving rise to several examples like those in (17), both of which are
pragmatically ambiguous:
(17) a. On leches heo hadde i-spendedet Muche del of hire
On physicians she had spent great part of her
guod.
wealth
(c.1300 SLeg.Kath. [MED spenden])
b. A smot him on þe helm . . . Wyþ þat stroke a schar

he smote him on the helmet . . . with that stroke he sheared
away a gret del of ys hare.
away a great part of his hair
(c.1380 Firumb.(1) (Ashm 33) [MED cappe])
The quantifier sense is fully constructionalized when it collocates with abstract Ns
especially of emotions, such as love, sorrow, whining. MED does not cite examples of
a del of in the quantifier sense ‘large amount’. A deal of occasionally appears as a
quantifier with no modifier in EModE as in (18b), but is more frequently found with a
modifier like great (18a):
(18) a. and talk’d a deal of impudent stuff. (1730 Trial of Margaret Fache,
t17320705-27 [OBP])
b. The Prisoner with a great deal of whining denied the thing. (1678 Trial of
Mary Read, t16781211e-8 [OBP])
This construction was probably not a direct model for a lot of because far fewer non-
modified examples of a deal of like (18a) are attested than modified ones: by EModE,
when quantifier a lot of came to be used, a great deal of was already a largely fixed
phrase as in (18b). Another partial candidate is a bit of (< ‘a bite out of ’), but here the
size is small. It too developed in the eighteenth century, but, unlike a lot of, appears to
have been considered acceptable in standard English.
In their study of the grammaticalization of quantification nouns like bunch in
binominal strings, Francis and Yuasa (2008: 50) conclude that there has been
bleaching of the original sense from concrete ‘bundle’ to abstract ‘large quantity’:
(19) bundle > collection > large quantity
(19) is true only of the singular as bunches ‘can only be understood in the bundle
sense’ (p. 52). Francis and Yuasa reject Brems’s (2003) claim that a bunch of is
grammaticalized and argue that for a bunch of there was no syntactic head shift,
therefore there is only semantic mismatch. They regard agreement phenomena to be
variable and non-diagnostic of head shift and argue that non-substitutability of lot
and bunch by much and many in the binominal strings shows they are not ordinary
quantifiers (pp. 50–51). However, consistent with Brems (2003), Brems (2011) argues
that while bunches of is not used with quantifier meaning and is not grammaticalized,
a bunch of is grammaticalized, but not as strongly as a lot of in PDE. This is because a
bunch of is productive (occurs in many type-constructions), is token-frequent when
unmodified, and has undergone head shift, as evidenced by agreement patterns.
It is preferred with a ‘valuative’ meaning, specifically negative prosody (Brems 2011:
182–183).5 Francis and Yuasa’s (2008) position regarding (partial) non-substitutabil-

ity by much and many ignores the historical fact that while older quantifiers like these
are roughly equivalent to core modals in that they reflect older syntactic patterns,
quantifiers in binominal structures are productive and distributionally congruent
with periphrastic prepositional syntax in ways analogous to the periphrastic auxiliar-
ies. It also ignores quantitative evidence that each binominal is associated (at least in
certain genres) with a specific frequency profile ranging from 0% quantificational
examples (bunches of ) to 100% (a lot of, lots of ) (Brems 2010, 2011; see Fig. 3.1 in
chapter 3.3.1). Further, Yuasa and Francis’s rejection of the evidence for resolution of
mismatch on grounds that collectives often have both singular and plural agreement
is problematic because the larger set of binominal quantifiers includes constructions
like a bit of, which has no collective semantics, so the argument from collectives does
not hold. We conclude that if a partitive has developed quantifier semantics and there
is evidence of syntactic head shift, as attested by agreement and anaphor patterns, or
if there has been phonological reduction of the quantifier, grammatical constructio-
nalization has occurred.
The changes occur in the local context of the original partitive construction and in
the wider context of the quantifier schema (which itself changes with the addition of
each new quantifier). Important too is the general shift in English morphosyntax
toward periphrasis. As we have seen, in OE the noun modifier occurs in the genitive
case; of was a largely ME development. So was the development of the indefinite
article, so the equivalent of OE hlot landes is now a lot/parcel of land. The change is
also part of the type-expansion of slots in the NP outlined in the next subsection.
5.3.3 Contexts for the development of an adjective of difference

into a quantifier: several
Here we discuss the development of another quantifier, several, this time from a
modifying adjective. This development further enriched the quantifier schema (but
did not participate in the periphrastic development). The increase in quantifier
construction types is part of a larger set of changes that the NP underwent during
the history of English. One of these changes concerns the development in ME of the
determiner (DET) slot and subsequently of what is often referred to as DP (see
Denison 2006) with predeterminers like all and quantifying a lot of (all the girls, a lot
of the girls), and, from the late eighteenth century on an increasingly large set of
options ranging from quite (quite a rake, quite the gentleman) to free relatives (what
appeared to be a male vampire) (see Van de Velde 2011 on expansion of the left
margin of the NP). The second major set of changes occurred in EModE and
concerns various changes in pre-nominal modifying adjective (MODADJ)
5
Further evidence is provided by phonological reduction, represented in writing as buncha (see Urban
Dictionary).
constructions. Most especially there were various types of expansion of the combina-
torial possibilities of constructions within the NP (see e.g. Adamson 2000, Breban
2010, 2011a, b). The categories within NP in PDE are generally agreed on (see Payne
and Huddleston 2002, Gonzálvez-Álvarez, Martínez-Insua, Pérez-Guerra, and
Rama-Martínez 2011). They arose gradually and are synchronically gradient (Deni-
son 2006). In EModE MODADJ was expanded by the development of a submodifier
slot for a semi-adverbial intensifying construction such as pretty in a pretty nasty
quarrel where pretty modifies the immediately following adjective, not N. Pure and
pretty came to be used as quasi-adverbs in the submodifier slot of the MODADJ
schema, where they modify adjectives. Other adjectives undergoing similar develop-
ments include lovely (Adamson 2000), intensifiers like well, as in well weird (e.g.
Stenström 2000, Macaulay 2004), pure as in pure white sheets (Vandewinkel and
Davidse 2008), and pretty as in pretty ugly. One of this set, very (from French verrai
‘true’) became a submodifier like pretty now is, and later was neoanalyzed as an adverb.
In some other cases, attributive adjectives denoting difference or sameness were
used as a quantifying postdeterminer and then as a quantifier in DET, e.g. several,
sundry, various, different, and distinct (Breban 2008, 2010, 2011a). Here we look
briefly at the development of several first as a postdeterminer and then as a quantify-
ing determiner (D-QUANT).
Originally several was used mainly attributively meaning ‘separate, distinct’ as in (20):
(20) a. Of whech xiii Defendauntz, iche persone by ye lawe may
of which thirteen defendants each person by the law may
have a several Plee and Answere.
have a separate plea and answer
‘Of these thirteen defendants, each is entitled by law to submit a separate
plea and have an answer’. (1436 RParl [MED defendaunt (n.)])
b. All men should marke their cattle with an open severall
all men should mark their cattle with an open distinctive
marke upon their flanckes.
mark on their flanks
(1596 Spencer, State Irel. [OED several Adj, A I.i.d; Breban 2010: 348])
Use in restricted contexts such as with plural nouns as in (21) is likely to have been
the critical context for neoanalysis since distinct plural persons or objects entail more
than one :
(21) All the sommes of the said xth part . . . be restored
all the sums of the said tenth part . . . to-be restored
and repayed to the severall payers therof.
and repaid to the separate payers of-it (1474 RParl. [MED paier(e) (n.)])
Several was early used as a postdeterminer signaling individuated, distributed

plurality, as in (22). This is constructionalization involving assignment to the post-
determiner slot and semantic change.
(22) The Psalmist very elegantly expresseth to us the several gradations by which
men at last come to this horrid degree of impiety. (1671 Tillotson, Sermons [HC
ceserm3a; Breban 2010: 325])
Evidence for the changes includes token frequency increases (which are not always
reliable indicators), distributional changes (decrease of singular NPs and later also
definite plural NPs) and changes in position relative to other elements in the
premodifying string. Now only several open marks is possible, not an open several
mark (20b).
Later there was a further constructionalization when several was used as a
D-QUANT as in (23), a further constructionalization. The new meaning is roughly
‘a few’ (not distributed). Formally there is a new distribution: use with singular
thousand in (23) rather than thousands (Breban 2010: 327):
(23) We have provided accommodation now for several thousand of the most
helplessly broken-down men in London. (1890 Booth, Darkest England [CL
3; Breban 2010: 326])
Like pure, several was multifunctional from the start, and also as in the case of
pure, the changes are primarily identifiable by increases in token frequency. Such
increases suggest that inferences of quantity were foregrounded. However, while
most of the other adjectives became intensifying submodifiers or postdeterminer
quantifiers, the original meaning of several (‘distinct’) in attributive uses as in (20)
was lost by the end of the eighteenth century (as was the predicate use), and the
quantifier use came to be the predominant one by the twentieth century (Breban
2010: 324). Now only several open marks is possible, not an open several mark (20b).
Some recent examples of D-QUANT several are attested with stacked adjectives in
(24). (24b) illustrates its use in DET preceding MODADJ with the submodifier pretty:
(24) a. probably the most visible one of several unending distinct financial supervi-
sion services there are actually is the credit-based card. (Network Technology,
Nov. 30th 2010, http://www.ntkmart.com/network-technolgy/the-best-thing-
to-realize-to-get-a-credit-card; accessed May 31st 2011)
b. I picked up a cheap hard drive camera a month or so ago and have done
several pretty ugly grilling related videos for my Vimeo channel. (http://
vimeo.com/928412, accessed May 31st 2011)
The stacking of elements before N as in (24) is known as ‘densification’ of the NP
(Leech, Mair, Hundt, and Smith 2009: chapter 10) is a further and more recent
change than the development of DP and of intensifying quasi-adverbial submodifiers

of MODADJ, but can be seen as related to the systemic expansion of the NP that has
been going on for a thousand years.
5.3.4 Contexts for the development of future BE going to

Various aspects of the development of BE going to were introduced in chapter 3. Here
we consider the issue of contexts for the change from motion to future, and how to
think about the source: is it a purposive motion construction, or go combining with a
set of constructions in the network? The received wisdom is that it arose as an
‘immediate’ or ‘scheduled’ future marker from ‘motion-with-a-purpose’ uses of go.
Recently Garrett (2012: 66–70) has challenged both of these assumptions. He pro-
poses instead that it arose from an extended use of go, which he calls inceptive
‘turning or preparing to do an action’ (drawing on OED go 34a, which includes ‘to
turn to, betake oneself to, proceed to’).6 That BE going to expressed relative (‘be about
to’) not deictic tense (‘will’) when it was first used as a temporal is attractive in that it
accounts for the seventeenth-century paraphrases ‘about to’ and ‘ready to’ illustrated
below. However, there is a problem with the proposal that the extended ‘turn/prepare
to’ meaning of go as it typically introduced a noun not a verb. Garrett points out
(p. 67) that the noun can be a gerund with -ing, and cites goe to writing or reading (in
a text from 1577); in such cases the noun has verbal properties. In the discussion
below we propose that the first examples suggest that BE going to initially emerged as
a relative, non-deictic future, meaning ‘later’ (which is consistent with ‘about to’), but
did arise from motion go. In other words, we will propose a rather different analysis
of this particular case of grammatical constructionalization than has been suggested
before, including by the first author of this book (e.g. Traugott 2012a, b). Traugott
(Forthcoming), however, presents an analysis similar to the one here.
In section 5.2.1 we pointed out that ambiguity has often been thought to be a
requirement for grammatical neoanalysis. In the case of BE going to, support can
be found over a period of about one hundred and thirty years in textual data for
Diewald’s concept of ‘untypical’ and ‘critical’ contexts, including not only prag-
matic ambiguity (untypical) but also morphosyntactic specialization (critical).
Two potentially ambiguous expressions appear in the data at the end of the
fifteenth century. Since the first example (25a) is a translation from Arabic, it
might be suspect, but the second, much cited, example appears only five years
later in an English monk’s report of a revelation (25b) and suggests that morpho-
syntactic specialization was occurring:
6
Núñez-Pertejo (1999) earlier proposed that BE going to as a temporal originally meant ‘be prepared to’.
She suggests (p. 137) that constructions such as purpose to, be about to, be about V-ing, be upon V-ing, be on
the point of may have been possible way-pavers for BE going to. Eckardt (2006: 102) also posits neoanalysis
of the motion expression as ‘being in preparation of, or about to do X’.
(25) a. ther passed a theef byfore alexandre that was goyng

there passed a thief before Alexander who was going
to be hanged whiche saide . . .
to be hanged who said
(1477 Mubashshir ibn Fatik, Abu al-Wafa', 11th C; Dictes or sayengis of the
philosophhres [LION: EEBO; Traugott 2012a])
b. while this onhappy sowle by the vyctoryse pompys of
while this unhappy soul by the victorious pomps of
her enmye was goyng to be broughte into helle for the
her enemies was going to be brought into hell for the
synne and onleful lustus of her body
sin and unlawful lusts of her body
‘While this unhappy soul was going to be brought into hell by the victorious
ostentatious displays of her enemies for the sin and unlawful lusts of her
body’ (1482 Monk of Evesham, Revelation 43 [OED go 47b; Arber 1869: 43;
Danchev and Kytö 1994: 61])
Both examples in (25) are likely to have been intended and understood by most
readers and hearers as involving motion with a purpose since in both motion in space
appears elsewhere in the clause: passed byfore in (25a), and broughte into helle in
(25b). To a twenty-first century reader the idea of a soul being physically taken
through the streets is anomalous at best, but in medieval times it was not, and indeed
earlier in the text the monk reports having a vision of the soul being led around by a
rabble of devils and tossed like a tennis ball:
(26) loe after that noyse and creye folowde a cursyd
lo! after that noise and cry followed a cursed
companye of wyckyd spyrytys and a mighty ledyng
company of wicked spirits and a mighty leading
with hem anone as they hopyde to helle a soule
with them immediately as they hoped to hell a soul
of a woman late departyd fro her body . . . Tho
of a woman recently departed from her body . . . those
wekyd spyryteys . . . castyd that soule amonge hem
wicked spirits . . . casted that soul among themselves
as a tenyse balle.
like a tennis ball
‘Lo! After that noise and cry followed a cursed and large company of wicked
spirits leading with them immediately, they expected, to hell, a soul of a
woman recently departed from her body . . . those wicked spirits . . . tossed
that soul among them like a tennis ball’. (1485 Monk of Evesham, Revelation
[Arber 1869: 42])
However, knowing the later history of BE going to, it is plausible to think that at
least some readers might have interpreted was goyng to in both (25a) and (25b) as
having more to do with intention regarding later events (an entailment of the
purposive) than with motion because the passive demotes agency and hence demotes
action by the thief in (25a) and by the soul in (25b). If so, (25a, b) exemplify untypical,
bridge implicatures and we may conclude that for some speakers and hearers there
may have been a contextual modulation that activated pragmatic ambiguity between
motion with a purpose and futurity. For them the pragmatics of later time may have
been foregrounded.
Both examples in (25) also illustrate unusual but ‘critical’ morphosyntactic contexts
for go. It is in fact these critical contexts combined that allow for the ambiguous
implicature. One of the critical contexts is what we call the ‘preprogressive’ BE -ing
(because in ME BE -ing was rare and not ‘a grammaticalised aspectual indicator in the
verbal system till 1700’, Rissanen 1999: 216). However, forms without be (and therefore
probably not ‘critical’ contexts) appear fairly frequently in adjunct clauses, as in
(27) Vor ij days goyng to Cogysbyry to gete tymbyr
for two days going to Cogsbury to get timber
vor the cherche
for the church (1447–8 Acc.Yatton in Som.RS 4 [MED])
Another critical context is use in a purposive construction. If this occurs, a direc-
tional PP usually intervenes between going and purposive to, as in (27). This means that
use of purposive BE going to with an immediately following verb as in (25) is highly
unusual. A third critical context is passive in the purposive clause, also as in (25).7 In
addition to being rare, examples of BE going to V appear in contexts where motion is
not only the reasonable reading, but is actually often primed by mention of movement
or location, and could be construed as more salient than relative future, e.g.:
(28) Than this sir Garses went to delyuer them and as he wente sir Olyuer Clesquyn
mette him & demaunded wheder he went and fro whens he came. I come fro
my lorde the duke of Aniou and am goynge to delyuer the hostages.
‘Then this Sir Garses went to deliver them (hostages), and as he went, Sir
Oliver Clesquyn met him and demanded whither he went and from whence he
came. “I come from my lord the Duke of Anjou and am going to deliver the
hostages” ’. (1525 Froissart, 3rd and 4th Book of Cronycles of Englande [LION:
EEBO; Traugott 2012a])
We therefore suggest that in some cases, the effects of context may best be
understood as spreading activation from semantically related concepts that occur
7
However, Peter Petré (p.c.) questions whether passive is as important or the progressive as rare as is
suggested here.
(frequently) in the surrounding discourse: participants in the discourse are primed to

focus not only on temporal reference generally (sir Garses went, he wente), but also
on contrasts between one point in time and another. This is set up by wheder he went
(implying later temporal reference) and fro whens he came (implying past temporal
reference); this is paralleled (albeit in reverse) by I come from (past reference) and am
goinge to (reference to later time). The examples cited here all show that the larger
context of prior discourse is crucial for understanding any construct and for thinking
about contexts for change. If only I . . . am goynge to delyuer the hostages were cited,
(28) would appear to be a likely example of the ‘relative future’, whereas if the prior
context is included, it is far less likely to be understood this way (although the
temporal pragmatics of later time are of course present by default because of the
purposive). The examples also suggest that, although the inference of later time can
be overridden and backgrounded by extensive motion contexts as in (28), it was in
most cases foregrounded, in other words, potentially more easily accessible.
While there is no disagreement about the eventual constructional status of the BE
going to relative and, later, deictic future, one question that arises is whether its
source was itself a construction, as implied by the almost ubiquitous reference in the
grammaticalization literature as ‘motion-with-a-purpose’. Focusing on the import-
ance of thinking of grammaticalization in terms of context and of strings larger than
single lexical items, Bybee says:
In grammaticalization, not only do new constructions arise out of existing constructions, but
also a further step is taken in that a lexical item within this construction takes on grammatical
status. (Bybee 2010: 30)
In Bybee (2006: 720) she refers to a cognitive representation which is a motion-

with-a-purpose construction. This interpretation of the source of the auxiliary is in
our view somewhat problematic in light of the perspective on grammatical construc-
tionalization we are espousing here. We need an account that picks out the ‘critical’
aspects of usage that enabled the development of the new meaning, and propose that
it did not originate in a motion-with-a-purpose construction. Rather, it originated in
the use of the micro-construction go (i.e. the lexical micro-construction) unifying
with a particular set of constructions, specifically: PURPOSEITR (short for purposive
with intransitive verb), BE -ing (the ‘pre-progressive’), and, optionally PASSIVE. In
this constellation of constructions, PURPOSEITR entailed intention of activity at a
later time (relative future), BE -ing signaled ongoing activity, and PASSIVE demoted
the agent of motion. Repeated use of go in the context of this constellation of
constructions led to semantic expansion: coding of the pragmatics of intention to
act at a later time, and use before verbs where motion was unlikely or unnecessary
(host-class expansion).
The examples in (29) are among the earliest attested plausible examples of BE
going to used as a temporal rather than a motion verb. In (29a) ‘he’ is unlikely to be
going anywhere to make a noose with his garters, he just needs to bend down, and in
(29b) the schoolboy is unlikely to be going far to be whipped (though this is not
excluded):
(29) a. So, for want of a Cord, hee tooke his owne garters off; and as he was going
to make a nooze (‘noose’), I watch’d my time and ranne away. (1611
Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedie [LION; Garrett 2012: 69])
b. He is fumbling with his purse-strings, as a school-boy with his points when
he is going to be whipped, till the master weary with long stay forgives him.
(1628 Earle, Microcosmography }19 [cited by Mossé 1938: 16; Garrett 2012: 69])
That BE going to was conventionalized as a temporal and recognized as such in the
early part of the seventeenth century is shown by the much-cited statement made by
a grammarian called Poole in 1646:
(30) About to, or going to, is the signe of the Participle of the future . . . : as, my
father when he was about [to] die, gave me this counsell. I am [about] or going
[to] read. (1646 Poole, Accidence 26 [Danchev and Kytö 1994: 67; brackets
original])
Slightly earlier evidence is also provided by an annotation of a passage from the Bible:
And Jakob said, Sell to me this day thy first birthright. And Esau said, Loe I am going to
dye: and wherefore serveth this first-birthright unto me? The annotation reads:
(31) going to die] that is, ready or in danger to die: which may be meant, both in
respect of his present hunger, which could not (as he profanely thought) be
satisfied with the title of his birthright: and of his daily danger to be killed by
the wild beasts, in the field where he hunted. (1639 Ainsworth Annotations
upon the five books of Moses, the book of the Psalmes and the song of songs
http://books.google.com/books?id=ki1BAAAAcAAJ; brackets original; accessed
June 6th 2011)8
While Ainsworth’s annotation may be meant to be theological not linguistic, it
confirms that he intended be going to to have a temporal meaning in his text, and
that at least one person other than Poole was aware of the new use. It also confirms
that at the time it was thought of as a relative rather than deictic future.
The shift to deictic rather than relative future appears to have taken place in
the context of the shift to full auxiliary status discussed in chapter 3.3.2. This shift
is correlated with the use of BE going to with be and other statives, and with use
in raising constructions, as in (32). (32a) is (20b) in chapter 3, repeated here for
convenience:
8
Many thanks to Richard Futrell for this reference.
(32) a. I am afraid there is going to be such a calm among us, that . . .

(1725 Odingsells, The Bath Unmask’d [LION; English Prose Drama])
b. Burnham. I should be glad to know what Freedom there was between us.
Bowers. There was going to be a pretty deal of Freedom, but I lost it in
the mean Time. (1741 Trial of Esther Burnham and Godfrey
Nodder, t17411204-5 [OBP])
Expansion from collocation with largely telic verbs like say, give make, tell, and
marry in the earlier periods to highly frequent verbs like be, have, do in the
nineteenth century is discussed in Hilpert (2008). Such expansion suggests that
during the eighteenth century temporal BE going to came to be construed as less
and less closely networked to the multiple sources that enabled it.
An indirect context was no doubt the extant auxiliary schema, which already had
several members. These were organized in two main subschemas, the far more token
frequent ‘core’ modals with monomorphemic form (will, shall, must, etc.), and a
periphrastic set (be to, have to, ought to). While the form of BE going to appears to be
partially matched to the periphrastic auxiliaries, the meaning is not. The periphrastic
auxiliaries had more to do with future obligation and probability than with ‘future’,
whether relative or deictic. So initially BE going to was only indirectly matched to
either set.
Although used far less frequently than the ‘core’ set, the periphrastic set was
nevertheless harmonic with the increasingly analytic syntax of English and was
presumably the default auxiliary form activated by analogical thinking. When
speakers began using the BE going to relative future at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century, they presumably aligned it to this periphrastic subschema. At the
time and through the beginning of the eighteenth century, the semantics of ‘deictic
future’ is to be found in the core auxiliaries like will and shall (see Nesselhauf 2012,
who uses the term ‘prediction’ for deictic future). Over time, as host-class expansion
and various types of syntactic expansion were occurring in the seventeenth century,
the semantics of BE going to came to be aligned with that of some of the core modals,
a semantic constructional change.
The proposal presented here acknowledges that analogical thinking was probably
involved in the development of the BE going to future, as argued by Fischer (2007,
2010). However, the analysis is significantly different from hers: meaning is con-
sidered crucial to the development, and only analogical thinking, not analogization is
considered to be a likely enabling factor. Furthermore, both the periphrastic and the
core modals are considered to have been contexts relevant to the change. While
Fischer presents adoption of BE going to into the category of auxiliaries as instantan-
eous and based on analogy with the form of the periphrastic auxiliaries, the data
presented here show that the initial entry into Aux was at the margins—initially it
was apparently a relative future mismatched with go used in multiply inherited
constructions. This is a characteristic of gradualness. De Smet (2012: 604) points to a

similar expansion of approximative about from inanimate to animate complements
as in about ten people left, and, attributing animate properties to the construction. He
says that about ‘fails for some time to fully realize its potential, appearing instead to
be constrained by more or less superficial generalization based on similarity’. Simi-
larly we can say of BE going to that speakers fail for some time to treat it as a full
auxiliary and use it as an only marginal member of that construction.
The argument presented above has implications for the traditional assumption that
there was polysemy between motion and future BE going to. As was suggested in 5.2.1,
heterosemy is the more appropriate concept for meaning shared between an earlier
and later construction, but in this case we have argued there was no earlier motion-
with-a-purpose construction, so there was no heterosemy in this case. It is reasonable
to suppose, however, that language users assumed some connection between con-
structs based on form, especially if they were literate. But it is also clear that access
to any resemblance grew weaker and weaker over time since the later history of the
BE going to future, as is well known, involves phonological reduction in spoken usage
to what is usually represented in writing as BE gonna. The first examples appear in the
OED at the very beginning of the twentieth century (Mair 2004), e.g.:
(33) Yo’re gonna get a good lickin'. (1913 C. E. Mulford Coming of Cassidy ix. 149
[OED gonna])
As Berglund (2005) shows, gonna is now the chief variant found in contemporary
spoken English.
Although speakers of contemporary English know that BE going to V can be used
in a construct expressing motion with a purpose, one factor that has not been the
subject of much discussion in the literature is to what extent it is actually used that
way. Traugott (2012b) points out that it is difficult to find examples in the first fifty
years of the Old Bailey Proceedings (1674–1723) of constructs of this form that
unambiguously mean motion not only before but also after the semantic change to
temporality occurred. This appears to have continued to be the case. A brief check of
Google Books turned up the example in (34):
(34) We are going to accept your kind invitation to visit your city; we are going to
visit the historic battle-fields that surround the city of Richmond; we are going
there not out of curiosity, but we are going to drop a tear in memory . . . (1904
The National Engineer, Vol 8: 11; accessed April 12th 2012)
The collocates accept, drop a tear require a future reading, visit allows, but does not
require, a motion reading. Only are going there unambiguously requires a motion
reading in (34).
In sum, we have suggested that the prime context for the development of the BE
going to future is use in constructs inheriting from a constellation of constructions.
Other contexts include the extant auxiliaries and the systemic expansion of auxiliar-
ies, especially modals (see Krug 2000 on emerging modals). As mentioned in chapter
3.3.1, this continues to enable the recruitment of new auxiliaries such as be fixing to
(largely used in Southern American English, and presumably analogized on BE
going to), got to, want to, and even non-verbal ones, such as (had) better.
5.3.5 Slots as contexts for the development of snowclones:

not the ADJest N1 in the N2
Internal conditions appear to have been sufficient for the gradual constructionaliza-
tion of the affixoidal subschemas that later sanctioned new word-formations. Fur-
thermore, there is some evidence of semantic clustering (lexical sets) in the creation
of new micro-constructions after the constructionalization of the lexical schema
takes place. This kind of clustering is also observable in the kind of micro-construc-
tions sanctioned by snowclones. Here, the notion that context includes ‘related nodes
that enable analogical thinking’ (see 5.1), is particularly important. Consider in this
regard the snowclone discussed in chapter 4.7 formulated here as [[not the ADJest N1
in the N2] $ [‘not very clever’]], to draw attention to the adjective. Examples from
COCA of this snowclone include:
(35) a. Junior’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. (1999 Karon, A New Song [COCA])
b. she’s as nutty as a fruitcake, a stuck-up mean girl, and not the brightest bulb
in the pack. (2011 Connors, Kelly’s Reality Check [COCA])
c. Poor Bill Frisk was not the quickest bunny in the warren. (2009 Lehner,
Southwest Review 94 [COCA])
In these cases, the meaning of the overall schema has to do with the intelligence of
the referent of the subject NP. The first adjective is polysemous, where one (meta-
phorical) meaning relates to intelligence, but the semantic cohesion of the rest
of the expression relies on an alternative (non-metaphorical) meaning. The non-
metaphorical meaning is a salient attribute of the noun it modifies (knives are known
for having a sharp edge, rabbits for being rapid in movement, and so on). This aspect
is part of the coded meaning (semantics) of the noun that fills the slot N1 in the
schema. In addition to linguistic semantic meanings there is usually encyclopedic
meaning that is part of the contextual background (see Terkourafi 2009 and 5.2.1
above). The noun in the PP that follows not the ADJest is a typical container for the
referent of the modified noun (knives are typically found in drawers, bulbs come in
packs etc.). However, the typical container is not a central part of the meaning of the
noun that fills the slot N2 in the schema—it is not part of the semantics of knives that
they are stored in drawers, or of bulbs that they should be bought in packs. As is the
case with most snowclones, this part of the meaning is encyclopedic and culturally
variable. Speakers have to draw on encyclopedic knowledge to interpret the snowclone.
The schema for the snowclone fully sanctions expressions in which one meaning of the
adjective is conventionally associated with intelligence, but the remaining linguistic
context draws on the more literal meanings associated with that adjective and on
encyclopedic knowledge of the relationship of the container to the noun N2.
The contextual meanings associated with a snowclone are activated only if the
expression is accessed as a snowclone, and not literally. Partial sanctions are also
attested, however. For instance, sweet is literally associated with gustatory perception,
but has a metaphorical association with pleasantness of character rather than intelli-
gence, which is the default for snowclones with the form [not the ADJest N1 in the
N2]. This may motivate expressions such as that in (36):
(36) He’s not the sweetest candy in the box, but I would be real reluctant to accuse
him of this level of lying about Paul’s stance. (http://www.westernjournalism.
com/ron-paul-denies-accusation-he-thinks-bush-responsible-for-911/; accessed
Nov. 29th 2012)
Similarly, hot is metaphorically associated with sexual attractiveness, a meaning
that may motivate expressions such as (37):
(37) Also, during the story, Steven develops a crush on Renee Albert, who is the
hottest girl in eighth grade. The odds of that happening are extremely unlikely.
Let’s just say he is not the hottest marshmallow in the fire. (http://booknook.
marbleheadcharter.org/2011/11/10/drums-girls-and-dangerous-pie/; accessed
Nov. 29th 2012)
The degree of conventionalization of such extensions remains to be determined, but
it is evident that for some users of contemporary English, the schema associated with
the form [not the ADJest N1 in the N2] has generalized from meaning ‘not very
intelligent’ to meaning ‘not very ADJ’ (where ADJ is the metaphorical meaning
conventionally associated with the adjective at the formal pole of the construction).
In other words, the development of this snowclone suggests a constructional change,
particularly, generalization of meaning.
5.3.6 Contexts for the rise of pseudo-clefts

In the examples we have discussed so far, relevant contexts have been constructions
in the network. Here we discuss the constructionalization of ALL and WHAT-
pseudo-clefts in broader discourse contexts,9 specifically those that are contesting
and ‘dialogic’—they implicate alternatives (see Schwenter 2000 on dialogicity; also
White 2003, Traugott 2010b).
9
See Östman (2005) for suggestions on how to think about larger discourse contexts as constructions.
His focus is, however, on genre, not argumentative purpose as here.
As indicated in chapter 3.5.2, in precursors of the ALL pseudo-clefts all is inter-

preted positively as ‘everything’, e.g. (38) ((42a) in chapter 3, repeated here):
(38) I loue thee dearer then I doe my life,
And all I did, was to aduance thy state,
To sunne bright beames of shining happinesse.
(1601 Yarrington, Two Lamentable Tragedies [LION: EEBO])
But there are real-life risks that one’s all may be found inadequate by others, as stated
very clearly in (39) ((41b) in chapter 3, expanded here). Here, on the battlefield of
Agincourt, King Henry prays, contemplating the murder of Richard II by his father,
Henry IV. He has cited some of the things he has done to atone for the crime and
promises to do more, but recognizes that whatever he does may not be enough:
(39) . . . More will I do.
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.
(1600 Shakespeare, Henry V, IV.i.320 [LION: Shakespeare])
This kind of conflictual situation appears to be the discursive context in which the new
ALL- and WHAT-clefts arose since early examples, particularly those with do, occur
in argumentative passages in which alternatives are raised and often rejected. In some
cases, like (40b), an interpretation that others have made is specifically rejected:
(40) a. Concerning the name of Picardy, it is a difficulty beyond my reading and my
conjecture. All that I can do is, to overthrow the less probable (‘plausible,
viable’) opinions of other Writers (1656 Heylyn, France Painted [LION: EEBO])
b. If it be objected that I preached to separate Congregations; my Answer is,
That I preach'd only to some of many Thousands that cannot come into the
Temples, many of which never heard a Sermon of many years. And what
I did, was only to preach to such as could not come to our Churches. (1697
Baxter, Mr. Richard Baxter's Last Legacy [LION: EEBO])
In (40a) all that I can do in the context of difficulty beyond my reading invites the
inference that everything is not enough or of no value, therefore the action specified in
the second clause is low on a scale of effectiveness; indeed the only thing the writer can
do is overthrow the less plausible opinions of others. In (40b) what I did invites the
inference that the action taken was restricted to the activity in the second clause, and did
not include the type of actions the author is blamed for. This is made explicit by only.
An interesting example in which two different potential interpretations of the
same action can be seen in the same sentence is:
(41) By all which your Honours may perceive, how he [Master Pet Senior] hath
falsly traduced the Commissioners of the Navie, . . . and all he drives at, is by his
unjust aspersions to bring the Parliament and them at ods, that so he might
accomplish his own ends. (1646 mscb [ICAME: Lampeter])
According to the author, everything Master Pet Senior purposes (drives at) is to cause
discord, a factor anticipated after his actions. This presumably is positive from Master
Pet’s perspective. From the perspective of the writer, however, it is negative and low on
a scale of morality—falsly and unjust are grounded in the writer, not he, since Master
Pet would not have characterized his own actions and remarks in this way.
Specificational constructions exclude alternatives, and it appears that when some
speakers used the new specificational pseudo-clefts they made them in part redun-
dant (see use of only in (40b), as well as if it be objected). In other words, the
discourse-pragmatic function is made overt in the discourse and the text in a variety
of ways, and the interlocutor’s task is to ‘find in, or construct from, the . . . common
ground a set of assumptions’, as Kay (2004) suggested in connection with let alone
(see 5.1). Over time, the structural properties of ALL- and WHAT-clefts came to be
identified with specificational exhaustive listing, and the pseudo-cleft could be used
in a wider range of contexts.
We have focused on the immediate argumentative contexts in which the pseudo-
clefts appear to have arisen. A larger systemic context is likely to have been the rise in
EModE of new ways to signal focus relationships (Los 2009). Los and Komen (2012),
for example, link the loss in English of verb-second (V2) syntax in the fifteenth
century, and hence the ‘loss of a first position that could host contrastive constitu-
ents’ (p. 884), with increase in token frequency of IT-clefts and especially the rise of
‘emphatic’ clefts such as (42):
(42) It is just twenty years that we had that very happy meeting at dear Coburg . . . !
(186x:1271.694 Victoria [Los and Komen 2012: 892])
How directly this development is tied to the rise of the pseudo-clefts remains to be
investigated, however.
5.4 Persistence of enabling contexts

In section 5.2.2 the issue of persistence was mentioned in connection with De Smet’s
(2012) proposal that actualization occurs in small steps that maintain similarity with
earlier uses, as in the case of all but and key. Earlier Breban (2009: 80) had pointed out
that ‘A newly emerging use developed by an item has to “fit in” with its source
structure, viz. it is “sanctioned” by the structure of the original use, and is in some
recognizable way structurally moulded by it’, exemplifying with examples of adjectives
of differences, e.g. different and other. Both Breban and De Smet take a structural and
syntactic view of persistence. Persistence had, however, originally been discussed
mainly in terms of meaning (Hopper 1991, Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994). In
either case, original distributions or semantics affect later developments and exert a
kind of pull-back effect on later developments thereby constraining the contexts

in which constructionalized elements may appear. This means that routines may
sediment and maintain (or even strengthen) links in a network. The topic of persist-
ence was introduced as one of the ‘principles of grammaticalization’ (Hopper 1991: 22).
However, it appears to be a factor in change in general.
Hopper’s discussion of persistence and De Smet’s of small-step actualization both
concern item-specific changes. With respect to pragmatic implicatures, these often
persist in a new role as coded semantics. As we have seen in the case of BE going to,
the implicature of ‘relative future’ from PURPOSEITR was semanticized as the
meaning of BE going to (Eckardt 2006). This is a process that Kuteva (2001: 151)
has called ‘context-absorption’ and is a small-step change in actualization of go in
specific contexts as a temporal. Likewise the implicature of quantity from partitives
like a bit of was semanticized as a property of binominal quantifiers. The original
partitive semantics is partially maintained, especially, as Brems (2011) shows, in the
case of small size parts (a bit/shred of ) or measures (an iota/smidgen of ).
With respect to critical morphosyntactic contexts, consider BE going to again,
particularly the context of the PURPOSE construction, which required an agentive
verb in the purpose clause. Using diachronic collostructional analysis, Hilpert (2008)
shows that intentional meanings such as agentivity, transitivity, telicity not only were
key to choice of verb that collocates with BE going to in the eighteenth, nineteenth,
and early twentieth centuries, but still continue to be, although statives (be, like)
occur, and light verbs (do, get, have) are in fact now preferred contexts. In other
words, the expanding host-classes are in part consistent with the original PURPOSE
context. He also illustrates the degree to which persistence of such contexts is
language-specific by comparing the history of BE going to with that of the Dutch
cognate gaan ‘go’ + V-Infinitive. As early as the seventeenth century, Dutch gaan
collocates with less active posture verbs in Dutch like zitten ‘sit’ (Hilpert 2008: 114)
than does BE going to in the seventeenth century. Over time in Dutch there was
a shift to atelicity and less intentional meanings such as are associated with
posture; furthermore, cognitive response verbs are currently preferred (beminnen
‘love’, denken ‘think’). This implies that English speakers have retained much of the
original source semantic context (agency, intention associated with purpose) during
the three centuries in which host-class expansion of the future has occurred (despite
divergence from the original go in specific constructional contexts). On the
other hand, Dutch speakers have not retained the agentive meanings of the original
source, but have expanded a less activity-oriented subset of collocations available
from the beginning.10
10
Another possibility is that the uses of Dutch gaan were not as distinctively purposive as the uses of
English BE going to, and clustered mainly around inchoative (‘coming into being’) (cf. Olmen and
Mortelmans 2009; thanks to Martin Hilpert for drawing our attention to this reference).
One of the item-specific changes discussed in this chapter is the development of

several (5.3.3). This case may appear to be different from e.g. a lot of, BE going to, and
the pseudo-clefts because the original use of several in the meaning ‘distinct’ was lost.
However, the steps of development are coherent in the way De Smet proposes for
actualization. Breban discusses in several places (e.g. 2009, 2010), that adjectives of
difference like different and other show partially similar histories, suggesting that
their earlier histories may be reflected in later distributions, meanings, and paths of
change. She identifies a subschema of adjectives of difference with NP-internal
structure where later uses are moulded in part by earlier structural uses.
As reference to schemas for different uses of adjectives of difference suggests, not
all persistence is a matter of item-specific actualization changes. In her discussion of
critical morphosyntactic contexts for grammaticalization, Diewald (2002, 2006) says
that they do not persist after grammaticalization, unlike untypical contexts (impli-
catures) which do persist (2006: 4). Her example is from the development of modals
in German. In this case what was lost was a modal morphological schema.
A constructional approach helps us distinguish between item-specific actualization
in which ties to older meanings and distribution can be shown at least in some
circumstances not only to enable changes but also to be maintained. When schemas
disappear this is of course not the case. However, original enabling schemas have not
disappeared in the case of binominal quantifiers, [not the ADJest N1 in the N2], BE
going to, pseudo-cleft or adjectives of difference.
In the case of lexical constructionalization, persistence of enabling contexts is
harder to determine. The item-specific development of Welsh nôl ‘fetch’ discussed
in chapter 4.9, appears, according to Willis’s (2007) analysis, to conform to step-by-
step development in which later steps are constrained by earlier ones. To what extent
original steps leading to compounding mould later innovations in the schema
remains to be studied. In the case of -lac, as noted in section 5.3.1, the earlier
OE compounds suggested a significant element of physical dynamism and energy,
which itself suggests persistence of the lexical meaning of lac ‘game, fight’. In some
cases it is, however, not always clear how a particular micro-construction in the
schema conforms to this generalization, cf. wedlock ‘marriage vow’ and ME shendlac
‘disgrace’. Whether bases for other derivational constructions, e.g. -dom show
equally little evidence of constraints from persistence is a matter for further research.
As is to be expected, if a schema is lost and subsequent constructionalization of
an atomic micro-construction takes place (see garlic, barn and stirrup), there appears
to be no persistence of either enabling/critical contexts or untypical contexts.
As is the case with other aspects of lexical constructionalization, the persistence of
enabling contexts appears to be much more variable than is the case in the develop-
ment of grammatical constructions.
5.5 Summary
In this and prior chapters we have shown that:
(a) Context is a pivotal factor in constructional change.
(b) As has been suggested in the grammaticalization literature, the contribution of
contexts is different prior to and after constructionalization. Replication of
pragmatic and morphosyntactic contexts involves constructional changes
which may lead to a ‘switch/isolating’ context and constructionalization—the
development of a formnew-meaningnew construction.
(c) In the case of new grammatical micro-constructions, prior to constructiona-
lization pragmatic modulation and use in preferred ‘critical morphosyntactic’
contexts occur. Post-constructionalization, the new micro-constructions tend
to be reinforced and crystallized partly as a result of various types of context
expansion, and partly as a result of becoming members of a larger schema. The
types of context expansion are those proposed in Himmelmann (2004):
expanded collocations (host-class expansion), hence expanded semantic con-
texts and pragmatic modulations, as well as expanded syntactic distributions.
Reductions set in with routinizations and frequent use, especially in informal
and spoken registers. Obsolescence or restriction to niches (narrow syntactic
contexts) may follow.
(d) In the case of new lexical schematic constructions, prior to constructionaliza-
tion pragmatic modulation and use with preferred lexical subclasses (host-
class sets) occur. The context here may be understood to be the local network
context, but the pre-constructionalization changes are often correlated with
genre or text type. Post-constructionalization new construction-types may be
formed on the schematic template; routinized use and competition among
templates may lead to structural reduction, possibly obsolescence of both
micro-constructions and schemas, as discussed in chapter 4.
(e) Constructions in the network with similar meaning and form may be import-
ant contextual factors and serve as models or attractors.
(f ) The larger context of systemic changes in the language is an important factor.
(g) Critical contexts may persist at the item-specific level or at the schematic level.
(h) Persistence may be structural as well as semantic.
In sum, individual changes in individual contexts need to be understood in terms
of the meaning and form of the original constructs in which a construction is used,
the preferred schematic constructions from which they inherit properties, the net-
work of the (sub)schemas into which they are recruited, and the relevant wider
changes occurring in the language at the time.
6
Review and Future Prospects
6.1 Introduction
In this brief chapter we summarize the main objectives of the book, and present a
synopsis of what our research has uncovered as we attempted to meet those object-
ives (6.2). We then suggest some areas for further research (6.3).
6.2 The major objectives

Our purpose in this book has been to explore ways in which aspects of language
change can be conceptualized from the perspective of cognitive construction gram-
mar, broadly construed. The key contribution of a constructional perspective to
rethinking earlier work on change is that the theoretical architecture encourages us
to think about change in form and meaning equally, as well as the creation of and
changes to links between constructions in a network. It is for this reason that we have
invoked the notion of a language network throughout the book.
The network model allows us to consider, in a consistent and uniform way,
changes both within and between signs, as well as the creation of new signs. Changes
within signs we have considered to be constructional changes: these are ‘internal’ to a
node in the network. The creation of a new lexical micro-construction may be
instantaneous, e.g. a new node is created as a result of a language user borrowing a
lexical construction from another language, or through a word-formation process
such as conversion of a lexical construction from one category to another. Alterna-
tively the creation of a new micro-construction or schema may be the product of a
series of constructional changes elsewhere in the network. This gradual creation of
a new node may result in the reconfiguration of links between nodes in the network.
It is what we have described as gradual constructionalization and have focused on
in this book. Constructionalization applies to both micro-constructions and schemas.
In discussing the implications of this approach, we hope we have laid out some
foundational points for further work within this framework. While individually they
are for the most part reformulations of proposals well-known from the literature on
language change, what is important in our framework is that together they form a
coherent set of theoretical claims regarding the nature of constructional change:
(a) Both form and meaning need to be considered equally in studying change.
(b) Change needs to be considered from both specific (micro-) and schematic
(macro-)perspectives.
(c) Change needs to be considered in terms of hypotheses about what types of
processes occur at which phases of change in a construction, and how a new
construction comes into being.
(d) Since lexical and grammatical changes are on a continuum from contentful to
procedural poles, they need to be viewed as complementary, not orthogonal.
(e) Change needs to be understood in terms of usage and networks.
(f) Innovations (i.e. features of an individual network) can be recognized as
changes only when conventionalized and taken up by others (i.e. they become
manifest in a population network).
(g) Change typically occurs in small discrete steps (gradualness over time),
resulting in variation (synchronic gradience).
(h) Being gradient, conventional patterns and norms of use allow for changes to
emerge over time.
(i) Analogization and alignment to sets are important mechanisms of change, but
as all change involves neoanalysis, neoanalysis is the more inclusive type of
change.
(j) Micro-constructions and the schemas in which they participate have their own
histories, constrained and influenced by the broader system of which they take
part.
We have engaged with the literature on grammaticalization and lexicalization
because it has been so influential in recent decades and so readily lends itself to
rethinking in the light of construction grammar. In our view, the ‘value added’ of the
constructional approach to language change that we have developed in this book is
that a usage-based network approach to change in signs at multiple levels of
abstractness allows us to rethink ways of approaching some of the complexities of
language change. Specifically:
(a) Grammatical and lexical constructionalization are not equivalent to either
grammaticalization or lexicalization. Rather, certain aspects of grammaticali-
zation and lexicalization can be incorporated within a more comprehensive
view of language change as sign change.
(b) Evidence of a continuum between contentful and procedural poles of the
constructional gradient show that grammaticalization and lexicalization are
not orthogonal developments. This is especially clear when developments that
show the growth of partially contentful and partially procedural constructions
are considered, and when cases of degrammaticalization are rethought in the
light of specific versus schematic changes.
Review and Future Prospects 233
(c) An approach based in form-meaning pairings obviates the need for elaborate
interfaces between modules.
(d) The ability to see how networks, schemas, and micro-constructions are created
or grow and decline, as well as the ability to track the development of patterns
at both levels, allow the researcher to see how each micro-construction has its
own history within the constraints of larger patterns, most immediately sche-
mas, but also larger related network nodes.
(e) Expansion and reduction are intertwined. Therefore, directionality of change is
more nuanced than has often been thought.
We have suggested some areas of current cognitive construction grammar that
would benefit from rethinking in the light of change. Among them are the notions of:
(a) Networks and subgroupings within those networks.
(b) Compositionality. This is best thought of in terms of a distinction between
compositionality on the meaning side and analyzability on the form side.
(c) Projecting original uses from present variation (see 3.4.3).
(d) Coercion as ‘requiring’ particular interpretations given mismatches between
lexical (contentful) and grammatical (procedural) meaning (see 5.2.2). It is
probable that coercion is not needed as a concept separate from metonymy
and best-fit interpretations.
(e) The distinction between ‘patterns of coining’ and constructions (4.7).
As in the case of our foundational points for further work on aspects of language
change, most of these issues are not new. We hope our perspective has drawn
attention to particular problems and suggested some ways of moving the debates
forward.
6.2.1 A summative example: ish

We turn now to a brief example involving constructionalization and constructional
changes which we consider to illustrate many of the themes of the book. We have
chosen this example because we believe it demonstrates the ‘value-added’ nature of a
constructional approach. Our example is English ish. This change in English has
been discussed from the perspective of (anti-) grammaticalization by Kuzmack
(2007), degrammaticalization by Norde (2009) and constructionalization by Trous-
dale (2011). For the earliest period, OE, Kuzmack (2007) distinguishes two types of
affix deriving adjectives:
(1) a. ish1, which is suffixed to nouns referring to nations or ethnic groups (e.g.
English, Welsh, Jewish).
b. ish2, which is suffixed to ‘generic nouns’ to form adjectives meaning ‘of the
nature of or like X’.
Since in both cases the derivational word-formation is denominal and both have
similar semantics, we suggest that in OE there was a word-formation schema of the
type in (2):
(2) OE ish schema
[[Ni.isc]aj $ [having character of SEMi]PROPERTY]j]
This schema had two subschemas, one in which N refers to nations or ethnic groups
(Ethnic ish):
(3) Ethnic ish subschema
[[Ni.isc]aj $ [having character of ethnic groupi]PROPERTY]j]
This Ethnic ish subschema became recessive in later ME, and is no longer product-
ive. While some of its members became morphologically more transparent (e.g.
Scott.ish, replacing the OE form Scytt.isc), in several cases there was segmental
attrition due to frequent use, the original bi-morphemic structure was lost (e.g.
Welsh), and some members, e.g. Greek.ish, ceased to be used, a phenomenon typical
of schema reorganization.
The second subschema (Associative ish), with common nouns as its base, origin-
ated in OE, but did not become very productive until EModE. The subschema
in this case is:
(4) Associative ish subschema
[[Ni.isc]aj $ [having character of entityi]PROPERTY]j]
Early examples are cild.isc ‘childlike’, which occurs in OE, but was not used with any
token frequency in the texts that remain to us until ME, menn.isc ‘human’, and fool.
ish (a ME formation). As the examples suggest, many came to be pragmatically
pejorative, and later bases are often semantically negative (Marchand 1969: 305 cites
several including hell.ish and hogg.ish). The pragmatic extension from ‘typical of N’
to ‘typical of and with the negative characteristics of N’ is a constructional change.
The Associative ish subschema continues to be productive, especially with pejorative
pragmatics.
In some cases the suffix .ish implied not only ‘characteristic of ’ but, more weakly
‘like/sort of ’ as in the case of water.ish, which MED glosses as ‘consisting of a great
deal of water, dilute’. In the ME period a new set of bases started to be used: colour
adjectives (e.g. yellow.ish, blu.ish). In these contexts the suffix .ish came to code the
meaning ‘like, sort of ’ (Approximative ish). Kuzmack (2007) refers to this use as ish3.
She points out that while what she calls ish2, as in childish (i.e. Associative ish),
emphasizes similarity to the base, this new meaning of the suffix .ish emphasizes
dissimilarity. This change in meaning may at first blush appear to be an instance of
a constructional change. However, the development of Approximative ish is a
constructionalization, since the form to which the suffix attaches may be ADJ as well
as N and the meaning is different from that of Associative ish:
(5) Approximative ish schema
[[Ai/Ni.ish]aj $ [having character like SEMi]PROPERTY]j]
It continues to be productive.
In the nineteenth century we find expansion of ish to complex bases, sometimes
compounds, sometimes clauses. As Kuzmack points out, this expansion, which is a
constructional change in our terminology, is found with both Associative ish and
Approximative ish. However, in the data, ish is more frequently instantiated by the
former. (6) exemplifies Associative ish, where ish means ‘characteristic of ’ and the
form is no longer constrained to unmodified N. This suggests a constructional
change from suffix to clitic may have taken place.
(6) A clean cravatish formality of manner.
(1836 Dickens, Sketches by Boz [OED -ish suffix1, 2])
Kuzmack (2007) cites pale yellow-ish (with modified adjective), right now-ish as
expansions of Approximative ish. A recent example is (7), in which ish has scope
over the premodifying adjective (new), not the noun (member) to which it is loosely
attached. Such a construct is harder to parse than those with Associative ish since the
structural links are looser:
(7) New member (ish) first ever thread (2008 http://www.cliosport.net/forum/
showthread.php?328235-New-member-(ish)-first-ever-thread; accessed Dec. 3rd
2012)
Kuzmack identifies what we call Approximative ish as the source for ish used as a
stand-alone word. This is in fact a further constructionalization. Since the new form
develops a particular procedural meaning, it is a partially grammatical constructio-
nalization: it has undergone formal neoanalysis (from clitic to independent word),
and semantic neoanalysis (from an approximator to an epistemic marker, as we will
argue immediately below). In (8) it is used as an answer in dialogue and means ‘Yes,
more or less, sort of ’. The text is a script for a play.
(8) CANARY How are you? . . . You’ve had two divorces and a pug named Pip.
You collect hats and advise people to drink great quantities of
spring water.
LLOYD You look completely different.
CANARY You look the same.
LLOYD Ish. I mean, my nose.
CANARY Well, that.
LLOYD At least you’re alive.
CANARY Ish.
LLOYD I thought you were dead.
CANARY We’ve said all that.
LLOYD Right. (1994 Beth, Revelers [COHA])
In (8) the semantics of independent ish is the same as that of the suffix meaning ‘like/
sort of ’. Norde (2009: 225) points out that use of ish as an independent word is
different from that of clipped forms like ism, ‘which functions as a hypernym for all
words ending in -ism’. This is certainly true of example (8). We may note that here it
is used as an answer in a slot where Yes, No, Right, Sort of are appropriate, and
therefore has been assigned not only degree modifier but also epistemic properties. It
is also not a hypernym in intensified uses such as are found in (9), where ‘very very
ish’ intensifies the approximativeness of ‘10pm-ish’:
(9) Show starts at 10pm-ish (very, very ish because we'll still have the Clucking-
Blossom fundraiser going on).
(2010 http://fbxshows.com/wp/bb/topic.php?id=244; accessed May 21st 2012)
Very recently a further change has taken place, where a new adjective meaning
‘unsure’ has arisen, as illustrated by (10):
(10) If you're like me and feel a little ish about dirty dining, you'll need more than a
couple drinks (2007 http://www.yelp.co.uk/biz/the-majestic-diner-atlanta?
start=40; accessed Dec. 5th 2012)
While the word-formation patterns discussed involve lexical, contentful micro-
constructions, and independent ish has characteristics of the class of adjectives (e.g.
modification by very), nevertheless, the Approximative ish micro-construction as
illustrated in (8) is further toward the grammatical pole since it comes to be linked to
the network of Degree Modifiers and procedural scaling elements. The network of
Degree Modifiers itself expanded exponentially in the EModE period with the
formation of new members, including very, pretty, fair(ly) (see Peters 1994, Nevalai-
nen and Rissanen 2002). The development of Approximative ish as an independent
word is relatively unique: it has some characteristics of an adjective (cf. intensification
with very), but it does not have others, e.g. use in comparative or superlative grade.
The derivational ish participates in primarily lexical schemas; in some cases, as an
independent word ish is also primarily lexical. Nevertheless, those uses that involve
approximation, including other uses of independent ish, link it to scaling degree
modifier expressions and therefore are partially procedural (grammatical) in mean-
ing. This has made the derivational schema less compositional, i.e. less saliently
adjective-creating, and comes to code the speaker’s assessment of and degree of
commitment to the veracity of the classification of the item as a member of a
particular set. Furthermore, the schemas have been reorganized over time such that
the Ethnic ish schema is no longer productive. In general there has been increase in
the productivity and schematicity of the schemas that did not obsolesce.
6.3 Some areas for further research

The present study is only the beginning of what we hope will be a far fuller investi-
gation of language change from a cognitive construction grammar perspective. We
have explored only a small set of examples. Vast areas of language change remain to
be investigated within this framework, for example word order change and the
development of various types of subordination. Many challenges remain, among
them how to account for phonological changes such as vowels shifts that affect
constructions for the most part regardless of their meaning. Most aspects of phono-
logical and phonetic changes directly relevant to constructionalization have not been
addressed in detail here (but see Bybee 2010 for related work). Particularly, the issue
of ‘chunking’ has only been alluded to in this book, yet it clearly has repercussions for
what we have considered as the primary mechanism of change, i.e. neoanalysis. Since
chunking is ‘a unit of memory organization’ (Newell 1990: 7), a new chunk is a newly
entrenched part of a cognitive system. Bybee has observed that
‘the bias towards reduction is a result of chunking: as sequences of units are repeated the
articulatory gestures used tend to reduce and overlap’. (Bybee 2010: 37)
As we have seen, as a product of constructionalization (whether grammatical like BE

gonna, or lexical like barn), entrenched micro-constructions often display internal
phonetic coalescence.
We have discussed examples from the history of what has come to be standard
English. Micro-analysis of the kind we have promoted here requires deep knowledge
and understanding of textual records through time. The histories of other varieties of
English, including World Englishes, and especially of other languages need to be
investigated by experts in the development of those varieties and languages with
similar attention to micro- as well as macro-changes. Testing the hypotheses put
forward here against languages with different constructional organization than
English but long histories such as Chinese and Japanese, would be particularly
valuable. Especially fruitful would be studies that considered typological construc-
tional differences among developments, for example of argument structure systems
and informational structuring systems.
We have been eclectic in our use of related versions of construction grammar.
Valuable too would be to take the framework of a different version of construction
grammar, for example, Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG), and compare
how it may contribute to the study of constructionalization and constructional
changes. SBCG clearly has the advantage in terms of precise formalization, and the
earlier HPSG version has been used with significant success (see e.g. Fried 2008,
2010). Issues that might be considered within an SBCG are whether it is possible for
constructions to develop that consist exclusively of form only or of meaning only.
A problem is that SBCG is not (or at least not uniformly) considered to be usage-
based, but the precise formalization allows the analyst to track micro-changes at the
appropriate level of granularity. Furthermore, detailed comparison between con-
structional and minimalist approaches to the kinds of changes described in this book
would be welcome. Roberts (2010) approaches issues of synchronic gradience and
diachronic gradualness using a model very different from that espoused in this book
(see also Roberts and Roussou 2003). Yet, although he uses a model involving
extended projections and fine-grained distinctions between various functional
heads, he too focuses on micro-steps in morphosyntactic change, such that the
gradualness that appears in the textual record is a consequence of a series of related
micro-changes. While there are clearly fundamental differences between minimalist
and constructional approaches to the human capacity for language, there are none-
theless some areas of convergence which might be explored in more detail1.
Our work in this book has presented a qualitative approach to constructionaliza-
tion and constructional changes. In this we have differed from Hilpert (2013), whose
research has been conducted in the tradition of quantitative corpus linguistics. We
consider the qualitative and quantitative approaches to be complementary for work
in historical linguistics and envisage the possibility of bringing the two approaches
together in studies of ongoing language change, where analysis of micro-variation at
the level of individual speakers could be combined with quantitative analysis of
macro-variation at the level of the social group. Such quantitative studies allow for
a more fine-grained approach to the relationship between frequency and entrench-
ment, and the degree of abstraction at which groups of speakers appear to organize
aspects of their linguistic knowledge. In this book, we have discussed some of the
ways in which schematization appears to correlate with increases in productivity, and
semantic generality, without providing concrete measures of such changes.
A quantitative approach may be able to provide some insights into the nature of
entrenchment of schemas, and prototype formation at the level of the micro-con-
struction. To return to an observation made at the beginning of this section, since
chunking appears to be an important factor in the development of a micro-construc-
tion, a quantitative corpus-based approach can demonstrate how, over time, a
‘chunk’ comes to be entrenched as a micro-construction (on which see Bybee 2010,
who however does not use the term ‘micro-construction’).
We have been keen to demonstrate the ways in which constructionalization
towards the procedural pole (grammatical constructionalization) is both similar to
1
Trousdale (2012b) discusses some similarities and differences between constructional and minimalist
approaches to grammatical change in an analysis of the what with construction, but this is programmatic
and would benefit from a more detailed treatment.
and different from constructionalization towards the contentful pole (lexical con-
structionalization), and have consistently emphasized the gradient between proced-
ural and contentful in this regard. While we have made reference to intermediate
constructions, we have not discussed this ‘inbetweenness’ or ‘hybridity’ in great
depth. In chapter 2, we examined in some detail the development of the way-
construction, highlighting the fact that some linguists consider this to be a kind of
lexical change, while others consider it to be a grammatical change. We showed that
recent changes suggest that the construction is becoming more procedural, gaining
an aspectual function. It is therefore becoming hybrid. Other constructions are even
more finely poised on the procedural-contentful gradient. As mentioned in chap-
ter 1.6.3, discussing examples such as He gave the team a talking to ‘He berated
the team’, Trousdale (2008a), argued that the micro-construction [[NPi GIVE NPj
[a V-ing]NP] $ [‘NPi physically attack or berate NPj’]] is a hybrid construction. Part
of the construction, associated primarily with the function of give, but including also
the roles played by the various NPs, is procedural, denoting telic aspect. Part of the
construction, associated with the meaning of the V, is referential and idiomatic, since
giving someone a talking to involves more than simply talking to them. Furthermore,
while the construction is only partly compositional, it is partly analyzable (e.g. the
noun in the third NP may be premodified by an adjective). The construction appears
not to be very productive (it is certainly less productive than other related construc-
tions which have light verbs, like take a walk or have a bath), nor is it highly general.
In other words, the hybrid nature of the construction makes it unlike a highly
grammatical construction (e.g. the WH-pseudo-cleft) and unlike a highly lexical
construction (e.g. garlic) along the key parameters we have used throughout the
book, schematicity, productivity and compositionality. We consider further work on
the properties and historical development of hybrid constructions to be particularly
important.
To conclude, we consider the constructional approach adopted in this book to
provide the foundation for a systematic qualitative treatment of the development of
procedural, referential and hybrid signs. We have restricted ourselves to a discussion
of signs used by (many) speakers of English, and have concentrated on those
developments which characterize the creation of procedural or contentful signs,
with less attention to the development of intermediate constructions. Our focus
has been to illustrate not only the development of micro-constructions, but also
the loss and gain of schemas over time, and the subsequent changes to and realign-
ments of micro-constructions as the schemas in which they participate expand and
contract diachronically. In order to do this, we have invoked the concept of a
constructional network, which we believe facilitates the discussion of changes to
micro-constructions and the schemas to which they are linked.
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Index of Key Historical Examples
a bit of, 17, 23, 26, 27, 53, 58, 77, 93, 106, 114, -leac ‘leek’ (OE), 12, 167, 180–181
116–118, 121, 126–127, 213–214, 228 -lian (OE), 178–179
a bunch of, 27, 116, 213–214
a deal of, 49, 53, 55–56, 58, 93, 106, 126, 212–213 not the ADJest N1 in the N2, 184–185
a heap of, 53, 58, 114–117, 201
a lot of, 17, 23–29, 36–37, 49, 53, 58, 93, 106, Partitive, binominal, 24–27, 49
114–118, 121, 125, 196, 201, 209–214
a shred of, 77, 93, 127 Quantifier, binominal, 24–27, 115, 126,
all but, 203–204 201–202, 209–214
ALL-cleft, 136–147, 225–227
-ræden ‘condition’ (OE), 173–177, 207–209
BE going to, 18, 67, 68, 102, 106–107, 114–118,
122, 126, 158, 217–224, 228, 230 -s genitive, 129–131
beside(s), 110–112 several, 214–217
-ship, 173, 175–176
Ditransitive, 14, 71–72, 96 -some, 69, 165
-dom, 64, 68, 169, 170–173, 207–209
-th, 17, 68–69, 181
-fire, 179–180 TH-cleft, 137–139, 141, 143, 146
give X a V-ing, 26, 34, 239 X is the new Y, 151, 183–184
habeo cantare (Latin), 32, 37, 38, 97 way-construction, 76–90, 114, 118, 120, 125,
-hood, 169, 175–177 150–151, 186
WHAT-cleft, 136–147, 182, 186, 187
-ish, 233–237 what with, 133–135
IT-cleft, 72–73, 146, 227 will be lucky to, 183
-lac ‘practice’ (OE), 207–209, 229 yn ol ‘after’ (Welsh), 190–191

Index of Names
Aarts, Bas, 25, 56, 74 Blythe, Richard, 53, 68
Adamson, Sylvia, 215 Boas, Hans C., 2, 4, 5, 15, 17, 47, 59, 62
Aijmer, Karin, 30, 110 Booij, Gert, 8, 53, 93, 152–154, 159, 161–162, 165,
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., 162 168–169, 172–173
Allan, Kathryn, 61 Börjars, Kersti, 99, 124, 129–130
Allen, Cynthia, 69–70 Boroditsky, Lera, 54
Allerton, David J., 137 Boye, Kasper, 20, 53, 104–105, 122, 155, 162, 202
Andersen, Henning, 2, 21, 36, 40, 55, 75, 98, Breban, Tine, 130–131, 215, 227, 229
128, 173, 190, 203 Brems, Lieselotte, 23, 25, 39, 49, 52–53, 58, 105,
Anderson, Earl R., 180 115–116, 126–127, 211, 213–214, 228
Anttila, Raimo, 32, 37, 99 Brinton, Laurel J., 32–34, 71, 73, 109, 156,
Arber, Edward, 218 158–160, 163, 182
Arbib, Michael A., 19 Broccias, Cristiano, 50, 90
Archer, Dawn, 41 Broz, Vltako, 168, 169
Arnovick, Leslie, 103 Brugmann, Claudia, 9
Auer, Peter, 47, 143 Buchstaller, Isabelle, 71, 193
Bybee, Joan L., 3, 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 20–21, 31, 35,
Baayen, R. Harald, 18, 87, 152 38, 43, 44, 46–48, 50, 65, 74, 94, 98, 100,
Baker, Colin F., 9, 50 105–107, 114, 119, 120, 122, 126, 132, 183, 186,
Ball, Catherine N., 73, 138 195, 200–202, 206, 220, 227, 238
Barlow, Michael, 3
Barðdal, Jóhanna, 14, 17, 40, 113–114, 116–119 Campbell, Lyle, 34, 35, 36, 100, 127, 131, 199
Bauer, Laurie, 153, 162, 164 Cappelle, Bert, 45
Beadle, Richard, 42 Catford, J. C., 196
Beavers, John, 33 Chafe, Wallace L., 197
Bencini, Giulia, 46 Cheshire, Jenny, 132
Berglund, Ylva, 223 Chomsky, Noam, 43
Bergs, Alexander, 39, 195 Claridge, Claudia, 103
Berlage, Eva, 150 Clark, Eve V., 167, 187
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo, 36 Clark, Herbert H., 167, 187
Bharucha, Jashmed J., 50 Clark, Lynn, 6
Biber, Douglas, 41, 196, 210 Claudi, Ulrike, 27, 98, 100, 199, 201
Birner, Betty, 136 Colleman, Timothy, 14, 39, 40, 71
Bisang, Walter, 40 Collins, Allan M., 55
Blakemore, Diane, 12 Collins, Peter C., 136
Blank, Andreas, 156, 162 Conrad, Susan, 210
Bloomfield, Leonard, 150 Cort, Alison, 114
Blumenthal-Dramé, Alice Julie, 5, 55 Cowie, Claire, 161
Index of Names 269
Craig, Colette G., 108 Fitzmaurice, Susan, 40

Croft, William, 1–4, 6–8, 11, 13–15, 21, 40, 48, Fleischman, Suzanne, 32
50, 53, 61, 62, 68, 91, 151 Flickinger, Dan, 161
Cross, Ian, 50 Fodor, Jerry, 11
Cruse, D. Alan, 2, 4, 7, 48, 200 Francis, Elaine J., 19, 27, 36, 213–214
Culicover, Peter W., 3 Fraser, Bruce, 109
Culpeper, Jonathan, 41 Fried, Mirjam, 21, 36, 39, 40, 237
Curzan, Anne, 145
Cuyckens, Hubert, 2, 155 Gahl, Susanne, 110
Garrett, Andrew, 117, 196, 217, 221
Dahl, Östen, 100, 107 Geeraerts, Dirk, 2, 65, 74, 169
Dalton-Puffer, Christiane, 170, 172, 174–176, Gelderen, Elly van, 75
178, 208 Giacalone Ramat, Anna, 159
Danchev, Andrei, 218, 221 Giegerich, Heinz J., 153, 157, 206
Dasher, Richard B., 26, 112, 202 Gildea, Spike, 40
Davidse, Kristin, 130, 215 Gisborne, Nikolas, 9, 11, 21, 40, 58, 63, 90, 113
De Clerck, Bernard, 14, 39, 40, 71 Givón, Talmy, 37, 47, 65, 99–101, 128, 201
Degand, Liesbeth, 103 Goldberg, Adele E., 1–8, 12, 14–15, 21, 38–40,
Dehé, Nicole, 110 45, 50, 54, 59–62, 72, 76–79, 84, 88–89, 114,
Denison, David, 56, 74, 114, 120, 130, 211, 214 118, 122, 146, 200–201, 204–205
De Smet, Hendrik, 29, 38, 47, 56, 58, 115, 117, Gonzálvez-Álvarez, Dolores, 215
120, 198, 203–204, 206, 223, 227–229 Gonzálvez-Garcia, Francisco, 186
Diessel, Holger, 47, 136 Goodwin, Charles, 202
Dietz, Klaus, 171, 174, 208 Gray, Bethany, 41
Diewald, Gabriele, 12, 28, 39, 95, 101, 103–104, Green, Lisa J., 102
108, 195, 198, 199, 206, 217, 229 Greenbaum, Sidney, 210
Doyle, Aidan, 131–132 Greenberg, Joseph H., 129
Duranti, Alessandro, 202 Gries, Stefan Th., 18
Du Bois, John W., 124
Hagège, Claude, 26
Eckardt, Regine, 36–37, 217, 228 Haiman, John, 18
Eddington, David, 186 Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard, 200, 202
Elmer, Willy, 69 Harder, Peter, 20, 53, 104–105, 122, 155,
Erman, Britt, 103, 182 162, 202
Eythórsson, Thórhallur, 40 Harley, Trevor A., 54
Harris, Alice, 35, 36, 199
Faarlund, Jan Terje, 131 Haselow, Alexander, 64, 162, 170–176, 208
Fanego, Teresa, 33, 80, 82, 87, 89 Haspelmath, Martin, 3, 32, 36, 37, 66, 75, 97,
Ferraresi, Gisella, 104 100, 112, 124–127, 190
Fillmore, Charles J., 3–4, 9, 39, 50, 61, 166, 185 Hawkins, John A., 47, 50
Finegan, Edward, 196, 210 Hay, Jennifer, 122, 152
Fischer, Kerstin, 109 Heine, Bernd, 26, 28, 35, 36, 38, 94–95, 98, 100,
Fischer, Olga, 21, 36, 37, 40–41, 58, 99, 126, 127, 101, 110, 133, 198–199, 201–202
198, 222 Heltoft, Lars, 19, 37, 40, 99, 136, 198
270 Index of Names
Hengeveld, Kees, 20 Kohnen, Thomas, 41

Herzog, Marvin, 2, 43 Komen, Erwin, 227
Higgins, Francis Roger, 136 König, Ekkehard, 26, 57, 196–197, 199
Hilpert, Martin, 18, 20, 145, 198, 205, 222, Koops, Christian, 144
228, 238 Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria, 23
Himmelmann, Nikolaus, 18, 28, 32, 106–107, Kortmann, Bernd, 134
112–114, 124, 145, 156, 163, 191, 196, 203, Kotsinas, Ulla-Britt, 103
211, 230 Krug, Manfred G., 67, 114, 158, 224
Hinterhölzl, Roland, 30, 136 Kuryłowicz, Jerzy, 99, 106, 161
Hinzen, Wolfram, 19 Kuteva, Tania A., 36, 56, 94, 101, 110,
Hoffmann, Sebastian, 43, 64, 71, 98, 106, 114 133, 228
Hollmann, Willem B., 7, 39, 40 Kuzmack, Stefanie, 233–235
Hopper, Paul J., 32, 37, 47, 63, 65, 96, 97, 134, Kytö, Merja, 41, 199, 218, 221
143–144, 151, 155, 201, 227, 228
Horie, Kaoru, 40 Labov, William, 2, 41, 43, 46
Horn, Laurence R., 200 Lakoff, George, 3, 4, 9, 45, 152
Horobin, Simon, 41 Lamb, Sidney, 50
Huber, Magnus, 41–42 Lambrecht, Knud, 73, 102, 136
Huddleston, Rodney, 136, 164, 215 Langacker, Ronald W., 1–4, 7–12, 14–16, 20,
Hudson, Richard A., 3, 9–11, 50, 54–57, 60–61, 27, 36, 44, 47–51, 53, 55, 61, 113, 122, 124, 126,
68, 152 131, 133, 206, 207
Hünnemeyer, Friederike, 26, 98, 100, 199, 201 Lass, Roger, 129
Hundt, Marianne, 18, 42, 66–67, 102, 216 Leech, Geoffrey, 18, 42, 66–67, 102, 210, 216
Lehmann, Christian, 32–34, 37, 43, 65–66, 73,
Israel, Michael, 16, 39, 40, 76–82, 86, 88, 90, 75, 96–98, 100–104, 106, 108–110, 112,
93, 211 122–124, 134, 136–137, 144–145, 156–160, 162,
171, 177, 190, 197
Jackendoff, Ray, 3, 12–13, 76–77, 79, 86, 87, 152 Levey, Stephen, 132
Jäger, Gerhard, 54 Levin, Beth, 33, 76
Jakobson, Roman, 99 Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara, 74, 200
Janda, Richard D., 40, 128, 190 Lewis, Diana, 112
Johansson, Stig, 210 Liberman, Mark, 186
Joseph, Brian D., 40, 147 Lichtenberk, Frantisek, 60, 74, 201
Jurafsky, Daniel, 13, 133 Lightfoot, David, 10, 36, 63, 76
Lightfoot, Douglas J., 150–151, 157, 159, 161
Kaltenböck, Gunther, 101 Lindström, Therese Å. M., 158
Kartunnen, Lauri, 183 Lipka, Leonhard, 34, 159
Kastovsky, Dieter, 110, 169 Loftus, Elizabeth F., 55
Kay, Paul, 2–4, 19–20, 39, 61, 62, 166, 182, López-Couso, María José, 30, 136
185–187, 195, 227 Los, Bettelou, 30, 136, 227
Keller, Rudi, 22, 26, 125, 202 Losiewicz, Beth L., 49
Kemmer, Suzanne, 3, 14
Kiparsky, Paul, 37, 98, 109, 127, 129 McClelland, James L., 16, 18, 38, 114, 119, 122
Kiss, Katalin É., 73 McKoon, G., 55
Index of Names 271
McMahon, April M. S., 30 Paul, Hermann, 46

Macaulay, Ronald K. S., 215 Pawley, Andrew, 18, 182
Machery, Edouard, 19 Payne, John, 215
Mair, Christian, 18, 41, 42, 43, 66–67, 102, Perek, Florent, 62, 72
216, 223 Pérez-Guerra, Javier, 139, 215
Marchand, Hans, 64, 68, 176, 178, 234 Perkins, Revere D., 31, 94, 98, 100, 106–107,
Martin, Janice, 32 132, 195, 227
Martínez-Insua, Ana Elina, 215 Persson, Gunnar, 201
Massam, Diane, 143 Peters, Hans, 236
Mattiello, Elisa, 187–188 Petré, Peter, 119, 120, 155
Meillet, Antoine, 35–37, 65, 102, 136, Petrova, Svetlana, 30, 136
141, 157 Pfänder, Stefan, 47
Meurman-Solin, Anneli, 30, 32, 136 Pichler, Heike, 122, 132
Michaelis, Laura A., 19, 20, 182, Plag, Ingo, 87, 206
204–205, 206 Plank, Frans, 63, 74
Milroy, James, 21 Poplack, Shana, 102, 198
Mondorf, Britta, 76, 77, 86, 89–90 Prince, Ellen F., 73, 144
Mossé, Ferdinand, 126, 221 Pullum, Geoffrey, 183
Mukherjee, Joybrato, 71 Pulvermüller, Friedemann, 45
Muysken, Peter, 74 Pustejovsky, James, 199
Nesselhauf, Nadja, 222 Queller, Kurt, 54

Nevalainen, Terttu, 32, 71 Quirk, Randolph, 210
Nevis, Joel A., 132
Newell, Allen, 237 Rama-Martínez, Esperanza, 215
Newmeyer, Frederick J., 98, 127, 190 Ramat, Paolo, 74, 127, 190
Noël, Dirk, 1, 39, 40 Rapoport, T., 76
Norde, Muriel, 34, 99, 103, 127–132 Ratcliff, R., 54
Nørgård-Sørensen, Jens, 19, 37, 40, 99, 136, 198 Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena, 46
Nunberg, Geoffrey, 166, 182 Rebuschat, Patrick, 50
Núñez-Pertejo, Paloma, 217 Reh, Mechthild, 36, 94, 100
Nurmi, Arja, 46 Reisberg, Daniel, 9
Renouf, Antoinette, 87, 152
O’Connor, Edward, 183 Ricca, Davide, 74
O’Connor, Mary Catherine, 3, 166 Rice, Sally, 54, 91–92
Östman, Jan-Ola, 21, 36, 225 Rickford, John R., 71, 159, 193
Rissanen, Matti, 42, 68, 103, 110–111,
Pagliuca, William, 31, 94, 98, 100, 106–107, 132, 219, 236
195, 227 Rizzi, Luigi, 33
Parker, Frank, 49 Robert, Stéphane, 108
Parkes, M. B., 41 Roberts, Ian, 10, 21, 36, 74, 75, 238
Partee, Barbara, 19 Rohdenburg, Günter, 143
Patten, Amanda L., 39, 40, 72–73, 90, 113, Rohrmeier, Martin, 50
136–138 Romaine, Suzanne, 199
272 Index of Names
Rosch, Eleanor, 74 Tham, Shiao-Wei, 33

Rosenbach, Annette, 54, 129 Thompson, Sandra A., 143–144
Rostila, Jouni, 1, 95–96 Timberlake, Alan, 203
Roussou, Anna, 10, 21, 238 Tizón-Couto, David, 139
Tomasello, Michael, 4, 45, 47
Sag, Ivan A., 2, 4, 62, 161, 166, 182 Torrent, Tiago Timponi, 72
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 4, 9, 43, 53, 99, 167 Torres Cacoullos, Rena, 18, 68, 102, 198
Scheibman, Joanne, 122 Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, 11, 16, 22,
Schiffrin, Deborah, 109 23, 25, 26, 31, 32, 33–34, 36, 38–40, 56,
Schlüter, Julia, 30, 67 57, 71, 73, 96–97, 105, 108, 112, 116,
Schmid, Hans-Jörg, 55, 202 136, 138, 145, 155, 156–160, 163, 182,
Schneider, Agnes, 35 193, 195, 199, 201, 202, 205, 217–219,
Schøsler, Lene, 19, 37, 40, 99, 136, 198 223, 225
Schulz, Monika Edith, 68 Trips, Carola, 162, 169–170, 175–176, 208
Schwenter, Scott A., 225 Trousdale, Graeme, 5, 11, 14, 16, 22, 26, 35,
Scott, Alan K., 130 38, 39, 56, 63, 68, 70, 74, 75, 95, 112, 130–131,
Selkirk, Elisabeth O., 23 132, 134–135, 150, 163, 164, 190, 193, 199,
Shibatani, Masayoshi, 101 238, 239
Shtyrov, Yuryv, 45 Tuggy, David, 14, 200
Siewierska, Anna, 7
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie, 30, Van der Auwera, Johan, 34, 190
103, 110 Van linden, An, 130
Sinha, Chris, 45 Van de Velde, Freek, 14, 131, 214,
Slobin, Dan I., 33, 48, 124 131, 214
Smirnova, Elena, 20 Vandewinkel, Sigi, 215
Smith, Jeremy, 40 Verhagen, Arie, 7
Smith, Nicholas, 18, 42, 66–67, 102, 216 Verroens, Filip, 40
Snider, Neal, 54 Verveckken, Katrien, 39, 40
Sowka-Pietraszewska, Katarzyna, 72 Vezzosi, Letizia, 196–197
Spencer-Oatey, Helen, 144 Vincent, Nigel, 99, 124, 129–130
Speyer, Augustin, 30 Von der Gabelentz, Georg, 102, 124
Stadler, Stefanie, 144 Von Fintel, Kai, 12
Stefanowitsch, Anatol, 18
Stenström, Anna-Brita, 215 Walker, James A., 18, 68, 102, 198
Stolova, Natalya I., 33 Walsh, Thomas, 49
Svartvik, Jan, 210 Waltereit, Richard, 202
Sweetser, Eve E., 105, 200 Ward, Gregory, 136
Syder, Frances Hodgetts, 18, 182 Warner, Anthony R., 21, 63, 74
Warren, Beatrice, 182
Tagliamonte, Sali, 102 Wasow, Thomas, 71, 166, 182, 193
Talmy, Leonard, 33, 78 Weinreich, Uriel, 2, 43
Taylor, John R., 47, 166 Werning, Markus, 19
Terkourafi, Marina, 13, 202, 224 White, P. R. R., 225
Index of Names 273
White, R. Grant, 126 Yuasa, Etsuyo, 27, 36, 213–214

Wichmann, Anne, 30, 110
Willis, David, 190–191, 229 Zhan, Fangqiong, 40
Wischer, Ilse, 101, 156, 160, 162 Ziegeler, Debra, 205
Wray, Alison, 182 Zwicky, Arnold M., 143, 166, 184
Index of Subjects
Acquisition, 21, 35, 47, 48 Analyzability, 20, 27, 69, 113, 121, 182, 233
adult, 21, 125 Anaphora, 109, 141, 143–145, 182, 211, 214
Activation, 133, 186, 200, 203, 207, 219, 223, 225 Argument structure, 5, 9, 12, 15, 40, 60, 69–70,
see also Spreading activation 108, 113, 187
Actualization, 120, 203, 227–229 Aspect, 12, 71, 72, 108, 219, 239
Adjective habitual, 65, 94
as base, 69, 171, 175, 178, 181 iterative, 13, 26, 87–88, 90, 94, 178–179
as context, 58, 93, 126, 172 stative, 107, 115, 142, 144, 221, 228
of difference, 214–217, 228–229 telic, 34, 155
quantifying, 55–56, 212 Attraction, 3, 19, 118–120, 123, 127, 165, 212, 230
Adjunct, 72, 81, 133, 219 Attrition, 100–101, 123–124, 147, 211, 234
Adposition, 97–98, 108 Auxiliary, 14, 38, 63, 67, 97–98, 102, 106, 109,
Adverb 117–118, 126, 199, 214, 221–224
deadjectival, 215–217 subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI), 12, 61–62
directional in the way-construction, 76–90 Awareness, of change, 22, 28, 57, 173, 221
use as pragmatic marker, 71, 110, 111 social, 125
status on lexical-grammatical gradient,
73–74, 95, 132, 157, 187, 215 Backgrounding, 202, 210, 220
use as subordinator, 108, 111 Binominal, 25–27, 49, 55, 58, 114, 209–214
Agent argument, 15, 186, 220 see also a bit/bunch/deal/lot/heap/shred of
Affix in Index of key historical examples
as output of change, 36, 97–99, 100, 162, Bleaching, 33, 64, 90, 102, 105, 106, 147, 174,
165, 169 193, 208, 212, 213
see also Debonding Blocking, 206
Affixoid, 153–229 Bondedness, 101–102, 110, 129, 131, 133, 169
characterized, 153–154
Alignment, 148, 232 Case, 32, 40, 66, 69–70, 108, 129–132, 168, 171
degree of, 57, 68, 138 genitive, 29, 209, 214, see also –s genitive in
Ambiguity, 29, 52, 185, 191, 199–200, 212, 219 Index of key historical examples
Analogical thinking, 21–22, 38, 57–58, 92, see also Argument structure
98–100, 126–127, 148, 195, 207, 222, 224 Cataphora, 109, 143–145, 182
Analogization, 35, 37–38, 57–58, 92, 93, 96, 99, Categorization, 36, 50, 61
119, 126, 146, 148, 203, 222, 232 Category, 4, 6–7, 10, 12, 13, 35, 48, 57, 66, 73–74,
Analogy, 21, 35, 37–38, 56–58, 99, 109, 118–119, 78, 114, 133, 151, 201, 205
126–128, 146, 203–204, 222 as attractor, 118
exemplar-based, 35, 37, 57, 74, 92–93, 96, grammatical, 101
109, 127–128, 165 margin of, 64, 205
UG-based, 109 strengthening of, 90
Index of Subjects 275
Change, characterized, 2 Constructionalization (Cxzn),

Chunking, 100, 122–124, 147, 199, 237 characterized, 22
Cleft, 102–103 Contentful construction, 12–13, 22, 26
see also Pseudo-cleft Context, defined, 195–198
see also IT-cleft in Index of key historical bridge, 101
examples critical, 101, 199, 212, 215, 217, 219–220,
Cline, 12, 90, 119, 162, 200 228–229, 230
of grammaticalization, 38, 65, 97–100 isolating, 28, 199, 230
Clitic, 38, 63, 97–98, 109, 122, 128–132, switch, 28, 199, 201, 230
190, 235 Context-absorption, 56, 58, 228
Coalescence, 34, 101, 109–110, 123, 158, 182, 238 Continua, 30, 73–74, 104, 149, 150, 156, 182, 186,
rate of, 122 188, 211
Coercion, 204–206 see also Gradience
Cognition, 50 Conventionalization, 2, 5, 8, 15–17, 20–21,
Cognitive linguistics, 1–8, 11, 39, 47, 50, 166 45–46, 52–53, 91, 104, 163
Coining, 78, 155, 165, 187 Conversion, 30, 34, 86, 161, 167, 187, 190, 231
patterns of, 186 Corpora, use of, 41–42
Common ground, 195, 227
Comparative reconstruction, 40–41 Data bases, use of, 43
Competition among alternatives, 18, 65, 68, Debonding, 129, 131–132
89, 105, 175, 198, 230 Decategorization, 116
see also Motivation, competing Degrammaticalization, 103, 127–131, 147,
Compositionality, 5, 19–20, 22–24, 27, 34, 83, 190–194, 232, 233
112, 122, 160–161, 164, 166–169, 176, Degree modifier, 117, 236
177–182, 185, 187, 193, 205, 233 Deinflectionalization, 128–132
decrease in, 23, 49, 68, 90, 96, 113, 120–122, Derivation, morphological, 30, 64, 128,
123–124, 158, 164, 191 154–155, 161–162, 168–169, 172, 174–178,
increase in, 96, 131 190, 208, 229, 234, 237
Compound, 22–23, 153–154, 156, 158–161, 162, Determiner, 103, 128, 130–131, 214–216
164–174, 179–181, 202, 207–209, 229, 235 Diachronic construction grammar, 18, 30,
see also Affixoid 39–40, 198, 228
Condensation, 101, 109 Directionality, of change, 54, 99–100,
Conditional construction, 19–20, 107 107–112, 120, 124–127, 147–149,
Constraints, 1, 2, 29, 37, 60, 61, 68, 72, 100, 102, 163–164, 190, 233
103–104, 109, 127, 135, 140, 146, 184, 203, Discourse
206–208, 229, 233 argumentative, contesting 138, 145, 198,
Construct, 2, 17 225–227
Construction, 13, 40, 151, 163 context, 195, 220
Construction, defined, 1, 11 function, 5–6, 8, 57
type, 83, 113–114, 118, 136, 137, 147, 174, Discourse marker, see Pragmatic marker
186, 230 Domain-general processes, 3, 46, 51
Construction grammars, 2–3
models of, 2–8 Emergence, 47–48, 92, 105, 168, 186, 199, 202,
Constructional change (CC), 206, 227
characterized, 26 Encyclopedic knowledge, 202, 224–225
276 Index of Subjects
Entrenchment, 5, 9, 55, 122–124, 238 172, 175, 177, 178, 182, 186, 189–190, 192,
Exemplar-based analogy, see Analogy, 199, 215, 223, 231, 232, 238
exemplar-based Grammar, characterized, 2, 3
Expansion, 18, 27, 28, 32, 33, 65, 85–90, 96–97, Grammatical construction, see Procedural
105–12, 123–126, 145–146, 147–148, 149, construction
163–165, 168, 172, 183, 192–193, 198, 203, Grammaticalization, characterized, 32
209, 211, 214–217, 220, 222, 230, 233, 235 Grounding, nominal, 130–131
host-class, 18, 83, 90, 107, 114, 115, 135,
144, 163, 172, 175, 191, 192, 208, 220, Hapax legomena, 87, 152, 169, 176
222, 228, 230 Heterosemy, 60, 107, 201–202, 223
semantic-pragmatic, 106, 107, 110, 112, Homonymy, 199–201, 206
145–146, 211 Host-class, see Expansion, host-class
syntactic, 103, 105–107, 111, 124, 135, 146, 193,
211, 222 Idiom, 3, 21, 121, 151, 159, 163, 166, 182,
183, 239
Feature, 4, 7, 8, 10, 21, 36–37, 46, 53, 56–58, 61, Idiosyncrasy, 3, 11, 28, 34, 44, 46, 50, 68, 150,
74–75, 91, 93, 101, 121, 123, 124, 148, 208 151, 163, 165, 182, 188–189, 205
Fixation, 101, 123 Impersonal, 40, 63, 69–71, 95, 160
Focus, 72–73, 95, 102–104, 137–139, 144–145 Inflection, morphological, 17, 37–38, 49,
Foregrounding, 160, 202, 210, 216, 219, 220 65–66, 97, 103, 128–131, 132, 153, 160, 161,
Frequency, 5, 18, 33, 35, 48–49, 64–65, 67, 105, 190, 209
110, 113–115, 119, 122, 127, 151–152, 173, 177, Information structure, 8, 12, 13, 32–33, 73, 103,
206, 214, 238 136, 141, 145, 197
token, 18, 124 Inheritance, 2, 3, 7, 59, 61–62, 71–72, 153, 166, 187
type, 18, 113–114, 119–120, 152, 162, 169, 171, default, 61, 152, 164, 185
173, 175–176, 181 multiple, 10, 61
Fusion, 28, 34, 97–98, 100, 109, 122, 161, 165, 177 Innovation, 2, 15, 17, 21, 46–48, 52, 53, 54, 57, 71,
Future, 1, 36–37, 66, 97–98, 102, 105, 122, 126, 90, 91, 100, 124, 141–142, 187–188, 203,
132, 217 229, 232
deictic, 217, 220, 221 Instantaneous change, 22, 26, 29–30, 75, 167,
relative, 217, 220, 222, 228 175, 186–190, 192–194, 231
see also BE going to in Index of key Integrity parameter, 101–102, 109, 110
historical examples Intensifier, 154, 215, 216–217
Invited inference, 26, 56, 57, 91, 199, 202
Generalization, 48, 53, 64, 68, 72, 106, 118, 132, 146, Invisible hand theory of change, 125, 202
154, 155, 169, 172, 174, 183–184, 208, 223, 225
Genre, 64, 67, 68, 125, 211, 225, 230 Knowledge-system, 50
Gradience, 11, 16, 20, 27, 56, 59, 74–75, 116, 122,
123, 151, 159, 163, 166–167, 170, 177, 178, Lexicalization, overview of, 33–35, 156–160
182, 199, 215, 232, 238 Lexicon, 9
Gradient, contentful-procedural, 13, 44, 90, Loss-and-gain model, 105
150, 154, 155, 157, 239
Gradualness, 18, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30, 44, 56, 64, 70, Marginality, 50, 52, 60, 63–67, 71, 88–89, 120,
74–76, 113, 116–117, 130, 132, 135, 161, 170, 127, 147, 205, 207–208, 222–223
Index of Subjects 277
Mechanism, 21–22, 35–38, 41, 58, 93, 99, 118, Particle, modal, 104
126, 205, 232 Partitive, 23
Metaphor, 9, 60, 105–106, 163, 206, see also a bit/deal/lot/shred of in Index of
224, 225 key historical examples
Metatextual marker, see Pragmatic marker Periphrasis, 39, 65, 76, 100, 102, 114, 124, 126,
Metonymy, 23, 105, 233 214, 222
Micro-construction, characterized, 16–17 Persistence, 19, 52, 66, 68, 70, 113, 130, 163,
Micro-step, 22, 29, 36, 39, 58, 75, 91, 186, 238 192–193, 204, 227–230
Mismatch, 19, 45, 50, 52, 57, 58, 83, 91, 121, 124, Polarity, 77, 93, 126–127, 183
201, 205–206, 213, 222, 233 Polygrammaticalization, 108
resolution of, 27, 53, 121, 123, 211, 214 Polysemy, 9, 15, 57, 59, 67, 72–73, 77, 92, 191,
Modals, 49, 63, 66, 72, 74, 98, 108, 158, 183, 199, 199–202, 223, 224
222, 224, 229 see also Heterosemy
core, 67, 68, 114 Post-constructionalization, 27–28, 92, 95, 115,
semi-, 67, 114 124, 169, 172, 178, 181, 186, 193, 198, 203,
Modularity, 11, 30, 54, 73, 101, 103, 148, 150, 151 211, 230
Motivation, 35, 38, 57, 99, 124–127 Pragmatic marker, 71, 73, 74, 101, 103–104,
competing, 42, 146 109–110, 112, 145, 160, 209
Pragmaticalization, 103
Neoanalysis, 21, 22, 25, 27, 35–38, 46, 49, 58, 71, Pre-constructionalization, 27–29, 63, 84, 91,
75, 79, 93, 99, 121, 122, 148, 166, 179, 95, 186, 198, 230
190–191, 199, 201, 215, 217, 232, 237 Prepositional ‘paraphrase’ of ditransitive,
Network, 1–3, 8–11, 14–15, 22, 38, 44, 45–46, 62, 72
50–51, 53–57, 59–77, 84–92, 108, 120, Priming, 54–55, 84, 134, 195
126–127, 139–140, 146–147, 148, 149, 151, Procedural construction, characterized, 12,
163–164, 172, 175, 188, 192, 195, 195, 13, 22
197–198, 204, 205, 217, 222, 230, 231–233, Processing, 16, 37, 51, 55, 71, 91, 122
236, 239 Productivity, 17–19, 22, 26, 33, 67–68, 71,
links in, 3, 9–10, 44–46, 51, 57, 59–73, 139, 85, 87, 90, 96, 112–114, 118–120, 123,
201, 228 126, 130, 153, 155, 163–165, 172, 174–175,
node, 3, 9, 158 181, 185–186, 191, 192–193, 198, 237,
social, 52, 74 238–239
Noun, use of count as mass, 204–205, 212 Projector, 143–145, 182
Prosody, negative, 213
Obsolescence, 50, 55, 66, 69, 74, 89, 92, 147, 155, Prototype, 9, 65, 74, 83, 120, 133, 204, 205, 238
160, 169, 172, 176, 192, 230 Pseudo-cleft, 136–137, 143–144
Organization, cognitive, 47, 50 see also ALL-/TH-/WHAT-cleft in Index
of key historical examples
Paradigmatic variability, 102–103, 109, 134 Punctuation, 41, 197
Paradigmaticity, 5, 37, 40, 67, 98–99, 101–104, Purposive, 72, 102, 140, 146, 217, 219, 220, 228
109, 129, 132, 162, 197, 198
Paradigmatization, 101, 106, 123 Quantifier, 17, 25, 51, 58, 114
Parameters, 75, 96, 101–103, 106, 109, 112, see also a bit/deal/lot/shred of in Index of
128, 239 key historical examples
278 Index of Subjects
Reanalysis, 21, 36–38, 75, 199 future, see Future

see also Neoanalysis past, 17–18, 20, 48–49, 61, 63, 68, 78, 203
Reduction, 27, 32–34, 41, 64, 67, 92, 96–97, Token, see Frequency, token
100–102, 108–109, 112–113, 114, 122, 124, Transitivity schemas, 60–61, 69–70,
126, 129, 132, 134, 143–144, 146, 147–148, 80, 84–85
151, 156, 159, 162, 163, 164, 170, 172, 177, see also Verb, intransitive, transitive
178, 181, 191, 192–193, 198, 208, 223, 230, see also Ditransitive in Index of key
233, 237 historical examples
Renewal, 65–66 Transmission, 21, 74
Reorganization of construction-types, 72, 76, Type, see also Frequency, type
87, 92, 172, 234
Resultative, 15, 60, 76–77, 89, 90 Unidirectionality, see Directionality
Rule/list fallacy, 48 Unit, 1, 3, 8, 11, 18, 22–23, 27, 34, 35, 40, 48–50,
57, 92, 100, 104, 126, 133, 157, 158, 168, 183,
Sanction, characterized, 15–17, 23, 44, 49–50 195, 196, 197, 207, 237
Schema, characterized, 12–13 Universal Grammar (UG), 24, 43
subschema, 17 Universals, 2–7, 126, 109
Schematicity, 12, 13–17, 22, 67, 90, 96, 112–120, Usage-based model, characterized, 3
123, 130, 147–149, 164, 165–166, 181, 193,
200, 207, 237 Vagueness, 199–200
Scope, change in, 101–103, 108–109, 111, 112, 235 Verb
Snowclone, 150, 183–186, 224–225 acquisition, 78, 80–83, 186
Specificational construction, see Cleft cognitive, 228
Specificity, 8, 11, 12, 14, 51, 103, 106, 113, deadjectival, 151
144, 146 intransitive, 6, 74, 78–85, 87–89, 118,
Spreading activation, 54–58, 60, 197, 219, 121, 142–143, 145, 155
128, 151 motion, 6, 13,
Step, see Micro-step transitive, 77–85, 87–89, 95, 96, 118, 142, 152,
Storage, 5, 48, 49 191, 197
Stress clash, 67 see also BE going to in Index of key
Subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI), see historical examples
Auxiliary see also Ditransitive in Index of key
Substantive construction, 12–14, 17, 33, 94–95, historical examples
181, 198, 217, 224 Word-formation, 30, 34, 69, 87, 122, 150–152,
Synonymy, 62, 72 154, 156, 160–170, 172–175, 183, 186–189,
Systemic changes, 29, 63, 70, 75, 129, 178, 197, 192–194, 197, 202, 207–208, 224, 231,
227, 230 234, 236
Word Grammar, 3, 9, 59, 61
Taxonomy, 3, 7, 13, 44, 59, 61 Word order, 29, 37, 63, 97, 99, 102–104, 121,
Tense, 12, 17–18, 95 136, 156, 162, 183, 237
OXFORD STUDIES IN DIACHRONIC AND HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS
general editors
Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts, University of Cambridge
ADVISORY EDITORS
Cynthia Allen, Australian National University; Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, University of

Manchester; Theresa Biberauer, University of Cambridge; Charlotte Galves, University
of Campinas; Geoff Horrocks, University of Cambridge; Paul Kiparsky, Stanford
University; Anthony Kroch, University of Pennsylvania; David Lightfoot, Georgetown
University; Giuseppe Longobardi, University of York; David Willis, University of
Cambridge
In preparation for the series
Word Order in Old Italian
Cecilia Poletto
Diachrony and Dialects
Grammatical Change in the Dialects of Italy
Edited by Paola Benincà, Adam Ledgeway, and Nigel Vincent
Discourse and Pragmatic Markers from Latin to the Romance Languages
Edited by Chiara Ghezzi and Piera Molinelli
Vowel Quantity from Latin to Romance
Michele Loporcaro
Syntax over Time
Lexical, Morphological, and Information-Structural Interactions
Edited by Theresa Biberauer and George Walkden
The History of Negation in Low German
Anne Breitbarth
Nominal Expressions and Language Change
From Early Latin to Modern Romance
Giuliana Giusti
The Historical Dialectology of Arabic: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches
Edited by Clive Holes
A Study in Grammatical Change
The Modern Greek Weak Subject Pronoun !"# and
its Implications for Language Change and Structure
Brian D. Joseph
Gender from Latin to Romance
Michele Loporcaro
The Syntax and Semantics of Vedic Particles
John J. Lowe
Syntactic Change and Stability
Joel Wallenberg
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean
Volume II: Patterns and Processes
Edited by David Willis, Christopher Lucas, and Anne Breitbarth

TRAUGOTT - TROUSDALE - Constructionalization and Constructional Changes

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Constructionalization and Constructional Changes

EL IZAB ETH CLO SS TRAUG O TT A N D

3.3.2 Increase in schematicity 116

5 Contexts for Constructionalization 195

Velde. We are also grateful to anonymous reviewers, both those commissioned by

Urban Dictionary http://www.urbandictionary.com/.

1.2 Constructional approaches to language

1.2.1 Berkeley Construction Grammar

1.2.2 Sign-Based Construction Grammar

1.2.3 Cognitive Construction Grammar

this framework ‘Cognitive Construction Grammar’. Goldberg (1995) focuses on argu-

(2) SEM: Move in order to do an action

SEM: Action type

1.2.4 Radical Construction Grammar

Figure 1.1 Model of the symbolic structure of a construction in Radical Construction

Croft (2001: 19) considers semantic meaning to refer to a ‘conventionalized feature

1.2.5 Cognitive Grammar

The absence of syntax in this model makes Langacker’s approach to constructions

It also involves degree of ‘speciﬁcity (or conversely schematicity) . . . the level of

1.2.6 Our representation of constructions

1.3 Networks and construction grammar

(a) a pairing of complex structure and meaning,

furniture musical instrument

ashtray chair table … piano viola …

Figure 1.2 A small conceptual network

1.4 Constructions and factors relevant to them

1.4.1 Constructions characterized

The dimension of phonological speciﬁcity concerns whether a construction

TABLE 1.1. Dimensions of constructions

1.4.2 Schematicity, productivity, and compositionality

Schema (e.g. quantifier schema)

Subschema1 (e.g. large quant) Subschema2 (e.g. small quant)

Micro-Cxn1 Micro-Cxn2 Micro-Cxn3 Micro-Cxn4

many a lot of few a bit of

FIGURE 1.3 Gradient of hierarchic relationships among constructions

1.4.2.2 Productivity Productivity is a term that has been used in a number of

The collocates identiﬁed in collostructional analysis tend to come in sets. For

Consider example (10):

1.5 A constructional view of change

1.5.1 A characterization and example of constructionalization

Minimally, constructionalization involves neoanalysis of morphosyntactic form and

b. He is only young, with a lot of power. (1895 Meredith, The Amazing

Head Modifier Modifier Head

Another, which we adopt here, is:18

1.5.2 Constructional changes

In the example of the development of binominal quantiﬁers, ﬁrst there was a

1.5.3 The relation of constructional changes to constructionalization

(23) That’s allota ducks

1.5.4 Instantaneous constructionalization

1.6 Diachronic work particularly relevant to this book

1.6.1 ‘Construction’ as used in earlier historical linguistics

Here ‘construction’ is clearly a syntactic notion and refers to a syntactic string or

In so far as Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca hypothesize that ‘the development of

The differences in approach depend in part on what the researchers’ view of

1.6.4 Mechanisms of change

The primary mechanism of change discussed in the grammaticalization literature

TABLE 1.2. Motivation vs. mechanism

Analogical thinking Analogization

Most discussion of analogization is exemplar-based, e.g. ‘we need to conceive of

1.6.5 Work on diachronic construction grammar

While much of the work on diachronic construction grammar has been on

1.8 Summary and outline of the book

By way of preview of this chapter, we use networks as a way of talking about